Why does this not surprise me? Meta’s Muse AI agent reportedly creates profiles of people in users’ lives even if they don’t use Muse.

As reported in Gizmodo (Meta’s Muse Is Collecting Information on Everyone in Your Life, written by Bruce Gil and available here), in” typical Meta fashion”, the company’s popular new AI agent Muse reportedly keeps detailed, regularly updated files on the people in users’ lives.

Nearly a month after its launch, researchers are digging into how Muse works. It turns out the AI agent will openly share internal files and instructions when users ask, offering a peek at how it operates.

One of the somewhat unsettling details is an hourly process that instructs Muse to create and update “a page for every person in the user’s life,” Wired reports.

According to system instructions published by The Future Society, these relationship pages can include a person’s name, how they are connected to the Muse user, recurring topics such as an upcoming apartment move or savings goal, and important dates like birthdays and anniversaries.

Independent AI safety and security researcher Karan Joshi extracted a trove of Muse instructions and system prompts through the app’s regular chat interface and shared the findings with Wired. Separately, The Future Society published system instructions from an exported copy of a Muse virtual machine.

“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,” Joshi told Wired. “They’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”

Gee, you think?

The new details come just weeks after Meta launched Muse on Sept. 8 as a personal AI agent that can handle tasks like sending emails, booking travel, shopping, and tracking goals. To do all that, users give Muse access to a wide range of their apps and accounts. Muse has since climbed to the number-one spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store chart for free iPhone apps. Which is bad news for those not using Muse – it increases the odds that they still might have a profile on the platform.

But (not surprisingly) privacy and security concerns have emerged almost immediately.

For instance, Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site in September, saying Meta had not notified the company in advance that the agent would access its online shop. The company also raised concerns about how Muse handles customer credentials and account data.

Meta also recently patched a zero-day vulnerability in the Mac version of Muse that could allow malware already running on a user’s computer to hijack the agent and take advantage of permissions the user had previously granted it.

So, what do you think? Are you using Meta’s Muse? Please say “no”. 😉 And please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using ChatGPT, using the term “robot using a social media app on a workstation with profiles of several other robots on the screen”.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.