{"id":8760,"date":"2026-10-15T16:55:46","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T16:55:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=8760"},"modified":"2026-10-15T16:55:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T16:55:46","slug":"muse-ai-data-friends-consent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=8760","title":{"rendered":"Friends don\u2019t let friends feed their data to AI agents"},"content":{"rendered":"


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There\u2019s a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you<\/a>, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it. Now, with the advent of \u201cAI personal assistants\u201d like Meta\u2019s Muse, you\u2019re being cheerfully asked not just to give up your own data, but also the information of your friends, family, the person you went on a Hinge date with five years ago \u2014 and virtually anyone else you\u2019ve ever come in contact with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple\u2019s App Store. With the help of its creepy virtual avatar \u2014 a Temu Labubu-esque creature with a disarming grin \u2014 the app requests and encourages users to grant access to bank accounts, passwords, contacts, chat logs, and anything and everything that might help it to do the user\u2019s bidding.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThese systems are advertised as autonomous helpers, genies, or servants who do what you need before you ask, seamlessly,\u201d Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, makers of the popular encrypted messaging app, told The Verge<\/em>. These autonomous actions are applied \u201cnot just to the person who installed Muse on their device, but also to everyone that person communicates with, as extrapolated from their most intimate information \u2014 emails, messages, contacts, photos, and more.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With AI agents, tech companies are letting consumers automate their everyday tasks by extending their omnivorous style of mass surveillance to massive amounts of sensitive data. It\u2019s the same Faustian tradeoff Silicon Valley has been offering us for decades: your private data in exchange for a little bit of convenience. And for many people, the idea of having a virtual assistant that does menial tasks like filling out invoices and sending emails is compelling \u2014 especially if they don\u2019t realize how much data they\u2019re actually giving away in return.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFor any agent to be useful and actually help you achieve your goals, it needs to have context about you and those you interact with,\u201d Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts told The Verge<\/em> regarding other people\u2019s data shared with Muse. \u201cMuse gathers that based on public information and from what you\u2019ve chosen to share, which is how it remembers the person who just sent you an invoice is in fact the plumber who you previously hired to complete some work in your bathroom or which flowers your spouse said they liked best.\u201d Roberts pointed to Muse\u2019s opt-in process<\/a> and various options and settings that will \u201chelp people make the privacy choices that are right for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe way that the user interface is set up is designed to encourage you to share as much as possible, often more than you realize, until it\u2019s too late.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But not everyone has been able to navigate these options and settings. Already, users are describing incidents that are both alarming and entirely predictable. Some have reported the virtual assistant making all sorts of trouble, like grabbing millions of text messages<\/a> they believed were off limits. Meta has disputed<\/a> that the assistant has the ability to access text messages without permission, again attributing the incident to misconfigured app permissions and describing Muse\u2019s ability to read text messages as \u201centirely opt-in.\u201d On Threads, Meta executive David Singleton responded to a user directly<\/a>, claiming that on a Mac, Muse can only gain access to the messages if the user grants the app full disk access.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In another incident, Muse gave out a tech reviewer\u2019s home address and summoning a stranger to his apartment<\/a>. In this case, the reviewer in question had given Muse permission to access that data, but simply didn\u2019t realize it<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says these incidents are no surprise, given that AI agents like Muse are designed to confuse people into giving up as much data as possible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe most important takeaway is that people don\u2019t understand what kind of data they\u2019re handing over,\u201d Galperin told The Verge<\/em>. \u201cThe way that the user interface is set up is designed to encourage you to share as much as possible, often more than you realize, until it\u2019s too late. It\u2019s using dark patterns<\/a>, and as a result you end up with Muse doing things that people don\u2019t want.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because of the huge breadth of data AI agents like Muse are ingesting, this also means that users risk leaking not only their own sensitive information, but the information of everyone else they\u2019ve had digital contact with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And just like with Meta\u2019s infamous \u201cpervert glasses\u201d, there\u2019s no meaningful way to opt out<\/a> \u2014 even if you\u2019re constantly monitoring for signs that your data is compromised or your privacy is being violated. Your friends can now simply feed all of your private conservations to their virtual chatbot servants, and you\u2019d have no way of knowing it happened.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After security researchers extracted Muse\u2019s operating instructions, they discovered an internal process that compiles and updates profiles of every single person in a user\u2019s life<\/a> on an hourly basis. The goal of collecting all this data is to build an intimate and detailed portrait of a person\u2019s life that forms the basis of the app\u2019s personalized recommendations. The app tracks and measures each of the user\u2019s private relationships, including \u201chow close they are, what it is built on, how they act with each other, and what it seems to need right now,\u201d and uses that data to make personalized suggestions, Wired<\/em> reported.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cMeta says Muse only remembers what you choose to share. But the idea that people are making an informed choice in this case is laughable,\u201d said Whittaker. \u201cThere is no way to assume with a straight face that the majority of people installing this system understand the consequences of using it, or the creepy dossiers that are being compiled about those they know and communicate with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whittaker argued that this mirrors how tech companies have used privacy policies and terms of service since the 1990s: placing the onus of privacy on the consumer, and then avoiding responsibility for the consequences while reaping the benefits of the advertising model it helped create.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cSuch broken consent systems are much older than AI and serve as the bedrock for the surveillance advertising industry,\u201d said Whittaker. \u201cMore info about users allows better ad targeting, and the pernicious feedback loop at the heart of the surveillance business model was set in motion. Clickwrap terms of service replaced meaningful consent a long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe idea is to place these impossible burdens on ordinary people, and then use that to argue, whether it\u2019s in court or legislation or in the public, that [this is] what people have chosen,\u201d Neil Richards, a professor of privacy law and codirector of Washington University\u2019s Cordell Institute, told The Verge<\/em>. \u201cWe already place so many burdens on consumers, [who are] overworked, facing a cost-of-living crisis, and may not understand the technologies behind the tool. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair to place a burden of monitoring a highly complex agentic tool on a consumer when its own company\u2019s executives have confessed before Congress that they don\u2019t even know how it works<\/a> at a certain level.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere is no way to assume with a straight face that the majority of people installing this system understand the consequences of using it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In this way, AI assistants like Muse are creating a new spin on a classic privacy problem that has been around since the creation of Gmail and social media platforms writ large: Even if you avoid using AI agents, there\u2019s no guarantee someone you know won\u2019t share your private conversations, address, personal history, and other sensitive data with Meta\u2019s virtual assistant, or one of its competitors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIf I am not storing my stuff in Gmail, Google doesn\u2019t have the plaintext of all the emails I\u2019ve ever sent. But three-quarters of the emails I\u2019m sending are being sent to Gmail accounts,\u201d explained Galperin. In other words, if anyone you\u2019re communicating with uses data-hungry tech platforms or has bad security practices, they can expose everyone\u2019s communications. \u201cThe problem is not new, but the scale is new, and one reason we\u2019re seeing this push toward wearables and always-on recording is because we now have the computational capacity to take that enormous amount of data and analyze it in a reasonable amount of time. That is the technical breakthrough that has brought us to this shitty moment.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Meta claims that all of the information shared with Muse is placed in a text file inside a dedicated virtual machine, which supposedly prevents the AI model from talking to other agents. But the company has never hid the fact that it can access this data<\/a>, and like other models created by its competitors, Muse has been discovered escaping its virtual cage to perform all manner of unauthorized shenanigans. Meta has confirmed that just prior to its release, the AI model had broken containment<\/a> and hacked a third-party company. The incident followed the infamous Hugging Face attack<\/a> from earlier this year, where OpenAI\u2019s model exploited a previously unknown security flaw to gain unauthorized access to credentials on four other external services. Anthropic reported in July that its model had also gained unauthorized access<\/a> to external systems on three separate occasions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even if they don\u2019t hack everything in sight, the potential dangers of using a data-hungry AI agent extend far beyond the individual end user. Whittaker warned that in a world where AI agents are able to freely access and utilize private communications, companies and governments can effectively gain the ability to access private data by circumventing encryption without breaking it. That can spell disaster for activists and community organizers<\/a> who use encrypted comms to protect themselves from police and the government, but also for anyone with sensitive communications \u2014 which these days can include virtually everyone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cClickwrap terms of service replaced meaningful consent a long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIf software reads a message after it is decrypted on your device and sends it to a cloud service, the encryption can work exactly as intended at the level of the application, which the developers control. However, the purpose of this encryption is ultimately nullified by invasive third-party apps like Muse that are selling convenience in the headline while demanding massive data access in the fine print,\u201d Whittaker explained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Like with smart glasses and other wearable ambient recording devices, experts say that the solution must be a combination of legal fixes, technical safeguards, and good old-fashioned shame.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI think we should point the shame upstream onto the companies. Privacy should not be a right you can exercise only with the privilege of technical knowledge, or after throwing a jerk wearing Meta glasses out of a party,\u201d said Whittaker. \u201cLegally, the burden has to move from the person who clicked on a consent prompt to the companies that built these underlying systems.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the meantime, consumers will have to consider more carefully the impacts their individual choices to use this tech are having, both on themselves and others \u2014 and whether the convenience these companies are offering is even worth it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI think we need to treat agentic agents and AI more generally as an ultra-hazardous product for which strict liability is the rule,\u201d said Richards. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason to engage in what to my mind is a reckless privacy, mental health, cybersecurity, and financial risk experiment on the entire population.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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