Backlash forces Meta to scale back employee keystroke tracking plans

Meta is scaling back its employee tracking system after backlash, adding pause and exemption controls over privacy and performance concerns.

David Uzondu Neowin · Jun 3, 2026 00:24 EDT with 5 comments

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Following employee backlash, Meta has decided to scale back its controversial Model Capability Initiative (MCI) tracking system.

According to an internal memo that Reuters saw on Tuesday, the social media giant is introducing new controls that allow workers to pause the tracking software for up to 30 minutes and request exemptions. Stephane Kasriel, the Vice President of Meta's AI model-building Superintelligence Labs unit who wrote the memo, said that the team remains "confident in the privacy protections we put in place at launch" while offering these concessions. Kasriel explained that the team is bringing "several optimizations" after workers complained that the software consumed excessive data and battery life.

Management introduced MCI back in April to capture exact keystrokes and screen content on corporate machines, hoping to teach AI models how humans perform office tasks. The program specifically monitors exactly what they type within a pre-approved list of work apps like Gmail, Google Chat, VSCode, and Meta's internal assistant Metamate.

When employees who did not like having tracking software on their laptops aired their concerns, Meta's CTO, Andrew Bosworth, shut down the complaints by telling staff members that there is "no option to opt out on your corporate laptop."

Meta is betting hard on Generative AI, so much so that the company recently laid off about 8,000 employees, representing roughly 10% of its workforce. Executives believe that AI tools will allow a team of ten people to do the work of a larger group.

The social media giant has also been on an AI spending spree with plans to spludge over $600 billion by 2028 on AI-ready data centers and has already poached top AI researchers with compensation packages as high as $300 million.

The social media giant is fresh off a new scandal where hackers are using prompt injection to trick the Meta AI support assistant into handing over Instagram accounts (even if 2FA is enabled). Among the victims of this security exploit is the official Obama White House account as well as highly respected app researcher and reverse engineer, Jane Manchun Wong.