Published On 4/23/2026
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Last update: 12:11 (Mecca time)
In a step bordering on espionage, the American company “Meta” decided to use tracking software installed on the computers of its employees inside the United States to record their use of these computers, including clicks and keyboard strokes, as well as taking random screenshots of the work they are doing, according to a report published by the American Bloomberg Agency.
The company internally justified this trend by saying that it intends to use this data to train the company’s internal artificial intelligence models on some tasks that it had previously faced difficulties in implementing, including choosing from pop-up menus or clicking on links and tracking them.
The new tool that Meta intends to use is called “Model Capabilities Initiative” (MCI) for short, and its use will be limited to work-related applications and tools, meaning that it will not have access to employees’ personal data or personal applications.
Its use will also be limited to US employees only at the present time, with no clarification whether the matter will extend to the rest of the company’s employees around the world or not.
For his part, Meta’s chief technical officer, Andrew Bosworth, explained that the company’s efforts to collect data and train artificial intelligence models internally will increase in an effort to achieve the ultimate vision within the company of having artificial intelligence models capable of performing various work tasks.
Company spokesman Andy Stone confirmed that the MCI data that the model collects from employees’ computers is among the data that Bosworth referred to.
Training for replacement
Meta’s use of this tool comes against the backdrop of a new wave of layoffs that the company is preparing to begin soon, according to a separate report from Reuters, as the company intends to lay off about 20% of its total employees in the coming months.
A separate report from the American Forbes magazine confirms that the wave of layoffs will begin at the end of next May, as the company intends to lay off 8,000 employees, in what is considered the third largest wave of layoffs that Meta has gone through since 2022, when it laid off more than 10,000 employees at once.
The company also intends to expand its investments in general to reach $135 billion compared to $115 billion last year, and of course the artificial intelligence sector will have the largest portion of these investments, as stated in the Bloomberg report.
For his part, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, had stated in a previous interview that he intends to replace many jobs with artificial intelligence robots, noting that the technology has become capable of performing the role of middle-level programmers.
The company’s reliance on artificial intelligence is not limited to replacing its employees only, but it extends to an attempt to completely clone Zuckerberg using artificial intelligence technology, so that employees can access him at any time, as well as leaving some tasks for Zuckerberg’s artificial intelligence copy to perform.
Legal concerns
Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Yale University, believes that techniques for monitoring employees and their computers are commonly used to search for errors and discover activities carried out by employees outside of work, in violation of their company policy, according to her interview with Reuters.
Ajunwa describes Meta’s trend of using direct monitoring tools as a type of oversight that was not common with technical staff and was only found in delivery jobs and the sharing economy.
While American law does not place restrictions on the monitoring tools that companies may use to track their employees, the matter is completely different in European laws, according to statements by Valerio Di Stefano, a law professor at York University in Toronto.
Di Stefano added that such a step might cause legal troubles for Meta in European countries such as Italy, which completely prohibits all electronic monitoring tools for employees, and the same applies in Germany, which requires a quasi-criminal or criminal presence in order for employee computers to be monitored.
