Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, builds a detailed profile of everyone in your life and updates it every hour. Here’s what’s in it and how to limit what it learns.
Your friend’s AI may have a file on you: where you live, your birthday, your money goals, even the fights you’ve patched up. You never signed up. Here’s what Meta’s Muse collects and the moves that keep you out of it.
🤯 WOW! Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, builds a page on every person in your life and updates it every hour. Where they live. Their birthdays. Their money goals. Even the fights you’ve patched up. Your friends and family never have to sign up. One person using Muse is enough.
The Short Version: Muse users should connect less and wipe its memory. Everyone else should think twice about what they text. Steps below.
📖 Read time: 2 minutes
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Picture a file on you. Where you live. Where you work. Your anniversary. The fight you had with your sister and how it got patched up. Even a reason to call you.
You didn’t write it. You never signed up for anything. Your friend’s AI did it for them.
That’s Muse, Meta’s new AI agent. It launched Sept. 8 for U.S. adults on WhatsApp, iPhone, Android and the web. Millions have downloaded it. It books trips, answers email and shops for you.
To do that, it wants to know everyone. Well, that’s a hard stop for me.
📇 What’s in your file
An independent researcher asked Muse to share its system files, and it did. Wired reported (paywall link) what was inside. Muse runs a process every hour that builds and updates a page for each person in your life: family, partners, friends, coworkers.
Those pages track where people live, their jobs, birthdays, anniversaries, shared trips, money goals, resolved conflicts and how close you are. Meta says it made the files available “in the interest of transparency.” (Sure.)
Here’s the part that should bother you.
Muse nudges you to connect more: email, messages, calendar, even your bank account and passport. Every text you send a Muse user can feed your page. That’s Meta’s AI knowing and tracking everything about you. What could possibly go wrong? Everything.
🔒 Lock it down
Using Muse? You’re in charge of what it sees.
- Connect less. Keep your bank, health apps and work email off-limits. Revoke any connection you don’t need.
- Make it ask first. Keep approvals on, so Muse checks with you before it sends an email or buys anything.
- Check the activity log. Meta says it shows everything the agent did.
- Wipe its memory. Meta says you can erase what Muse remembers at any time. Do it now and then. I am super skeptical that anything really gets erased.
Not a Muse user? You can’t opt out of someone else’s AI. So:
- Ask before they plug you in. A quick “Hey, does your AI read our texts?” is fair game.
- Save private stuff for a phone call. Texts get read. Voices fade.
- Point them to the lock. Meta says an encrypted version, where only the user holds the key, is coming this year. That’s the one to use.
FYI, this isn’t only a Meta thing. Every AI agent that reads your messages learns about the people in them. Meta’s is just the first file we’ve seen.
Did I install Muse? Absolutely not, and I suggest you don’t either. What does the letter p in Meta stand for? Privacy.
📩 Send this to someone who lets an AI assistant read their texts and email.