Meta's Muse AI: Personal Assistants Exposing Your Friends' Data
Meta's personal AI app Muse has surpassed millions of downloads and hit No. 1 on the App Store, raising privacy concerns over third-party data access.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Meta launched Muse, an AI personal assistant that surpassed millions of downloads and hit No. 1 on the App Store last month.
- The app requests access to sensitive personal information including bank accounts, passwords, contacts, and chat logs.
- Experts warn that such systems gather data not just from the user, but also from friends and acquaintances who never consented.
- Meta defended the app, stating it gathers data from public sources and user-shared information with opt-in privacy settings.
A growing trend in consumer technology involves gadgets and software designed to monitor everything around you, regardless of whether anyone else has consented to it. With the rise of personal AI assistants like Meta's Muse, users are cheerfully encouraged to surrender not only their own personal data but also the information of friends, family, acquaintances, and virtually everyone they have ever interacted with.
Since Muse was released last month, the AI agent has already been downloaded millions of times and climbed to the No. 1 spot on Apple's App Store. Assisted by a virtual avatar featuring a disarming grin, the application requests and encourages users to grant access to bank accounts, passwords, contacts, chat logs, and everything else that might help it execute tasks on the user's behalf.
Photo by Austin Distel / Unsplash
Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal Foundation, the maker of the encrypted messaging app Signal, told The Verge that these systems are advertised as autonomous helpers or genies that fulfill needs before being asked. She noted that these autonomous actions apply not just to the person who installed Muse, but also to everyone that person communicates with, extrapolated from their most intimate information such as emails, messages, contacts, and photos.
The integration of personal AI assistants into daily routines highlights a decades-old Silicon Valley playbook: trading private data for a fraction of convenience. In the case of Muse, the requirement for deep context to automate tasks naturally expands surveillance boundaries, inadvertently compromising the privacy of third parties who never had a chance to opt in.
Tech companies are allowing consumers to automate everyday tasks by extending mass surveillance into massive amounts of sensitive data. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts stated regarding other people's data shared with Muse that any useful agent requires context about the user and their contacts. Roberts explained that Muse gathers information based on public data and user-chosen sharing, pointing to the app's opt-in process and settings designed to help people make appropriate privacy choices.
Nevertheless, users have struggled to navigate these options and settings, leading to alarming and predictable incidents. Some users reported the virtual assistant accessing millions of text messages they believed were restricted. Meta disputed that the assistant can access messages without permission, attributing the issue to misconfigured app permissions and describing Muse's text-reading capabilities as entirely opt-in. On Threads, Meta executive David Singleton responded directly to a user, claiming that on a Mac, Muse operates within specific limits.
Source: The Verge
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