Meta Muse could read your private messages without permission, report finds

Meta has launched a new personal artificial intelligence (AI) agent called Muse , and it seems to be pretty powerful.

A little too powerful , perhaps, as one writer has just revealed how the tool read his personal text messages without permission, then lied about what it did when questioned.

As explained by Inc writer Jason Aten , “I was having a conversation with my Primary Technology podcast co-host, Stephen Robles, about the new iPhones.

Moments later, I got a push notification from Muse suggesting that the conversation we were having would make for a good column and offered to put together research for me to write about.

It even flagged a message from my editor about having a column ready for Monday.” The problem here is that “not only had I not asked it to do that sort of thing,” Aten stated, “I never gave it permission to read my messages.

In fact, I remember explicitly choosing not to let it have access to my messages, calendar, and other personal information.” After Aten asked Muse how it knew about his messages, the AI agent flubbed that it grabbed the relevant info from push notifications relating to Aten’s texts, not from inside the messages themselves.

The problem? Aten is sure that’s not true.

The author discovered that Muse syncs your messages to Meta’s servers.

On his device, this feature “had been activated and synced to row 187,462 of my Messages database,” Aten noted.

“I’m not sure how many messages that equates to, but it’s obviously more than whatever Muse told me about what it was doing.” Meta says it designed Muse to be “a safe, secure, private, and widely available personal AI agent.” But sending a user’s private messages to Meta’s servers then providing a misleading answer about what it was doing doesn’t exactly align with Muse’s stated goals.

It we’re to judge companies on their actions rather than their words then Meta doesn’t come out of this smelling much like roses.

A familiar pattern (Image credit: Meta) This is just the latest incident in a recent glut of bad press for Meta, with much of it centering on its AI efforts.

For example, a security researcher discovered that Muse can be manipulated into sending your voice recordings and more to a hacker’s server, while Amazon has banned the AI agent from shopping on its website.

And Meta is apparently considering using a “human concierge” system that would involve real people handling a percentage of the potentially sensitive phone calls that can be placed using Muse.