By Tuesday afternoon, the flyers were everywhere. Meta employees at several US offices walked into meeting rooms, broke for coffee at vending machines, and used the restrooms only to find pamphlets denouncing the company's new mouse-tracking software as an “Employee Data Extraction Factory” and urging staff to sign an online petition against it.

The leaflets cited the National Labor Relations Act and the right to organise for the improvement of working conditions, according to Reuters' exclusive.

The protest is the first visible internal pushback against the Model Capability Initiative, the tracking programme TNW reported on last week, which captures mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots on a designated list of work applications.

Meta has said the data is used to teach AI agents how humans navigate software, and that it runs only on a specified set of apps and websites rather than across all computer activity.

The framing has not landed evenly. “If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them, things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus,” Meta said in a statement, adding that “safeguards” were in place to protect sensitive company information.

Many employees, according to Reuters, read the programme as workplace surveillance reframed as training data, and a step toward automating their own jobs.

The timing has sharpened that read. Meta is roughly a week from its 20 May layoffs, which the company has said will cut about 10% of its workforce, or some 8,000 of its 78,865 staff, with further cuts planned for the second half of 2026.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told an earnings call in January that 2026 would be “the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.” Inside the company, that line is now being read as a description of which jobs are being captured into a dataset.

The protest infrastructure is more organised than spontaneous. The flyers point employees to a petition; UK colleagues have already begun a unionisation drive with United Tech and Allied Workers, recruiting under a website at Leanin.uk.

The campaign is small relative to Meta's headcount, but it is the kind of internal-cohesion problem Meta has historically avoided. The company's last visible bout of staff dissent, the 2018 walkouts over sexual-harassment policies, ended in policy changes rather than retaliation.

The data-protection layer is the second front. The Model Capability Initiative, as disclosed in the internal memo seen by Reuters, runs on company-issued machines and is framed by Meta as voluntary in spirit but mandatory in practice for staff using the designated apps.

Whether that survives scrutiny in jurisdictions with stronger employee-privacy regimes is unclear; the EU's existing rules on workplace surveillance set a higher bar for proportionality and worker consent than US federal law currently does.

Meta's earlier internal controversies over AI training data have not gone smoothly either. Last month, a breach at the company's data-labelling vendor Mercor put parts of its AI training pipeline at risk and prompted a temporary freeze on some data work.

The 20 May cuts are still to come. The petition, by Tuesday evening, was still circulating.