Paresh Dave and Lauren Goode reporting for Wired (Apple News+):

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.

The data, which was collected as part of a divisive initiative to train artificial intelligence models, is believed to include keystrokes, mouseclicks, and content displayed on the computer screens of Meta's US employees.

As I’ve previously snarked, “I never thought leopards would surveil me,” sobs woman working for the Leopards Surveilling People Company. (A confession: When I read this story, I laughed so hard my Apple Watch gave me a “Loud Environment” warning.)

The leaked employee data, stored in “45,000 hive tables,” exposes—

[…] employee activity such as “full prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data,” according to documents viewed by WIRED.

Dave and Goode continue:

In an internal post responding to employees’ questions on Monday seen by WIRED, Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said that the tracking program’s implementation had fallen short of the standards outlined in its privacy review and that findings from the incident would be shared. “Here we had misconfigured ACLs [access control lists] and we need to understand how that happened, track down every data access and understand it,” Bosworth wrote.

A couple of months ago, Bosworth told employees concerned about potential data leaks that the tracking program is “tightly controlled” and uses the same protection standards, storage systems, and access controls as other sensitive datasets, according to internal posts seen by WIRED.

It’s comforting knowing that the vast trove of sensitive data collected by Meta across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Messenger is as tightly controlled as employee keystrokes.