Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has paused a program that tracked employees’ computer activity amid data privacy concerns and a staff backlash.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had introduced a tool that tracked staff keystrokes, mouse clicks and content displayed on computer screens in order to collect data for training its AI models.

More than 1,600 Meta workers signed a petition against the tool, called the Model Capability Initiative, demanding the company does not harvest “employee ‘computer use’ data”.

The petition said: “Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace.”

The tech publication Wired reported this week that MCI data collected from corporate laptops had been accessible to anyone inside the company. It cited an internal security notice that referred to the exposure of data tables including “full prompts and transcriptions, private conversations, people and performance data”.

Meta confirmed the program has been paused.

“We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we’re pausing it while we investigate,” the company said in a statement.

Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, had told employees that AI models – the underlying technology that powers AI tools such as Meta’s chatbots – learn from “watching really smart people do things”, according to an account of an internal company meeting.

“The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks,” he said, adding that the coding skills of Meta engineers would dramatically improve a model’s coding abilities.

Zuckerberg is pouring vast sums into an AI drive at Meta and is spending up to $145bn (£110bn) at the company in capital expenditure this year, with much of it going on AI investment such as datacentres.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has reported that Zuckerberg recently ordered a small team at the $1.4tn company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, prediction market sites that allow users to place wagers on events ranging from Tony award winners to the Iran conflict. Kalshi and Polymarket are trading a combined total of $24bn a month, according to the Pew Research Centre.

The tentative project has been called Arena and would function separately from Meta’s social media and messaging apps, reported the NYT, which added that the proto-app remains in development and may not be released.

Mike Proulx, a research director at the analysis company Forrester, said moving into a controversial area such as prediction markets – which have already drawn legal scrutiny in the US – was “not a great look” for a company under legal pressure because of its social media products.

Meta has been contacted for comment.