Meta’s latest move to implement keystroke tracking among its employees has sparked a viral backlash inside the company. An engineer’s candid internal post detailing their fears over surveillance and exploitation garnered support from nearly 20,000 coworkers this week.
The Model Capability Initiative (MCI), as Meta calls it, records screen activity when certain apps are used for training AI systems on how humans interact with computers. The initiative has been mandatory among US employees since last month, but concerns over privacy and exploitation have grown.
“Selfishly, I don’t want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of privacy,” wrote the engineer in a post shared widely inside Meta’s internal coding forums. “But zooming out, I don’t want to live in a world where humans—employees or otherwise—are exploited for their training data.”
The petition demanding an end to the MCI has been circulating since last Thursday and reflects broader discontent among Meta workers. Morale is reportedly at an all-time low, with some employees organizing a union to push back on workplace surveillance.
While only US employees are currently affected, UK colleagues fear the tracking could spread. “I think of it pretty much as a breakdown of trust,” said Eleanor Payne from United Tech and Allied Workers, helping organize Meta’s employee unions. She noted that new laws in the UK have encouraged workers to unionize.







