United Kingdom, June 24 -- Meta has paused a controversial company-wide employee tracking programme after discovering that some of the collected data may have been accessible to staff across the company.

The initiative, known internally as the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), was launched two months ago as part of Meta's efforts to gather data that could help train artificial intelligence systems.

The programme recorded information including mouse clicks, keystrokes and other computer usage patterns from employees while they worked.

However, the initiative quickly sparked criticism from workers concerned about the extent of the monitoring, how the data would be used and whether it would be adequately protected.

Meta confirmed on Mon...