Meta left potentially sensitive information collected from employee laptops accessible to anyone inside the company, according to an internal security notice seen by WIRED and three current employees familiar with the issue.<\/p>\n
The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models<\/a>, is believed to include keystrokes, mouseclicks, and content displayed on the computer screens of Meta\u2019s US employees.<\/p>\n Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirms the company is investigating the security issue. “We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards,\u201d he says, adding, \u201cwe have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees.\u201d<\/p>\n The security notice sent out Monday indicated that \u201cemployee data across 45,000 hive tables,\u201d had been exposed. Those tables included employee activity such as \u201cfull prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data,\u201d according to documents viewed by WIRED.<\/p>\n Some employees at Meta quickly seized on the security failure, saying in internal forums that it validated concerns they had raised when the company began tracking workers\u2019 corporate laptops in April as part of a program known as the Model Capability Initiative.<\/p>\n Comments about the incident posted on internal forums Monday included questions about how Meta\u2019s privacy reviews failed to prevent the breach, and whether everyone whose data was potentially exposed will be allowed to attend a meeting going over what went wrong, according to posts seen by WIRED.<\/p>\n In one internal forum where staffers are known to trade jokes, an employee posted a meme from The Office of the character Jim Halpert holding a sign that reads, \u201c0 days since our last nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n Sources at Meta, who were not authorized to speak publicly, tell WIRED the incident has now been marked as closed, meaning it was likely resolved. In an internal post to employees on Monday, Andrew Bosworth, Meta\u2019s chief technology officer, said that the tracking program\u2019s implementation had fallen short of the standards outlined in its privacy review and that findings from the incident would be shared.<\/p>\n Last month, more than 1,600 employees at the tech giant signed an internal petition<\/a> protesting the laptop surveillance effort, warning that \u201ccollecting this data introduces both security and regulatory risks for Meta, including the potential for breaches and unauthorized disclosure.\u201d The petitioners also expressed concerns with what they viewed as a lack of safeguards that Meta had put in place. One engineer also wrote a widely shared internal note<\/a> saying having their laptop screen scraped for training data without their consent felt like an invasion of privacy and amounted to exploitation.<\/p>\n