Meta’s new AI agent Muse might come with a cutesy new mascot, but under its fuzzy exterior lies a vast surveillance network under the control of one of the world’s most powerful — and least accountable — tech companies.
The flashy new service has gained plenty of traction over the past few weeks, with many reviewers praising its utility in everyday life — as Eli Tan wrote for the New York Times, he was “blown away,” calling it the “most useful AI app I had ever used.”
But as researchers dig beyond the surface of Meta’s new AI offering, it’s becoming clear that Muse comes with a major drawback: users aren’t just signing their own privacy rights away, but those of their friends and family as well.
As Wired reports, the AI agent keeps detailed files on people on the periphery of its users’ lives, regularly scooping up new information about them. These updates are reportedly coming once an hour, with an internal instruction for Muse to maintain a “page for every person in the user’s life.”
“What it seemed like to me — from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse — is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people,” Karan Joshi, an AI safety researcher who extracted Muse’s internal prompts and shared them with Wired, told the magazine.
In other words, Joshi says “they’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”
That news comes after Meta’s engineers flagged a massive vulnerability that would have allowed Muse users to bust their way into the Meta database undergirding the AI agent’s functions. A fix was reportedly cobbled together right before Muse launched, in a “mad dash,” as one Meta employee told 404 Media.
“Many senior engineers believe it’s inevitable we’re going to have a massive data breach as a result of [Muse],” a Meta insider explained to 404.
Whether the internal “friends and family” files would have been included in this database isn’t quite clear, but it seems obvious that Muse comes with some massive safety and privacy risks — not just for the user, but for anybody in their life.
More on Meta: Meta Is Kicking Gay Bars Off Its Apps While Allowing Videos of Graphic Child Abuse
The post Meta’s Muse Is Spying on All Your Friends and Family appeared first on Futurism.
