TL;DR
Meta is scaling back its employee keystroke and mouse-click tracking programme after 1,500 workers signed a petition. New controls let employees pause tracking for 30 minutes at a time, but the programme itself continues.
When Meta announced in April that it would install software on US employees’ work computers to capture their keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screenshots for AI training, the company’s head of technology Andrew Bosworth was blunt: “There is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop.”
Two months and more than 1,500 petition signatures later, there is an option. It lasts 30 minutes.
In an internal memo seen by Reuters, Stephane Kasriel, a vice president in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs unit, told employees that new controls will allow them to pause the tracking software for up to 30 minutes at a time. Staff can also request full exemptions from the programme, though the memo did not detail the criteria for approval.
What the tool collects
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The Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, was designed to teach AI models how humans perform everyday computer tasks. Internal materials reviewed by Reuters showed the system collecting interaction data across more than 200 applications and websites, with possible capture of email contents, chat messages, browsing history, clipboard actions, code changes, and device activity.
Meta has said the data is “not used for any other purpose” and that the tool includes “safeguards to protect sensitive content.” But employees were not reassured. One told the BBC in April that having their actions train AI models felt “very dystopian,” particularly given the expectation of further job cuts. Another described the tool as “just the latest way they’re shoving AI down everyone’s throat.”
The practical complaints
The backlash was not purely philosophical. Employees reported that the tracking software drained laptop batteries and caused home internet usage to surge, a tangible cost for workers who were already being asked to train the AI systems that many believed would eventually replace them.
Kasriel acknowledged these concerns in his memo, saying the team had introduced “several optimisations” to reduce the tool’s impact on battery life. “While we remain confident in the privacy protections we put in place at launch, which went through several layers of risk review, we have heard your concerns about personal data on work devices, battery life, and wanting more control over when capturing happens,” he wrote.
A concession, not a retreat
The 30-minute pause is a concession, but a carefully bounded one. Meta is not abandoning the programme. It is not making the opt-out permanent. It is offering employees a brief window of unmonitored work, then resuming collection. The framing suggests Meta views the tracking as operationally necessary and the pushback as a communication problem rather than a substantive one.
The timing adds context. Meta has cut approximately 8,000 jobs this year, roughly 10% of its workforce, while simultaneously redirecting $135 billion into AI spending. The employees generating training data for Meta’s AI agents are, in many cases, the same employees whose roles those agents are being built to automate.
A separate concern has also emerged around European data. TNW reported that the MCI is collecting substantially more EU employee data than Meta has publicly acknowledged, raising potential GDPR compliance questions that the 30-minute pause does not address.
Meta declined to comment on the record. The petition, with more than 1,500 signatures, remains active. The tracking, with a 30-minute pause button, does too.
