Meta is disputing a journalist's claim that its AI agent Muse read the user's private messages without permission. The company's response follows an earlier report from Inc. columnist Jason Aten detailing the issue.
Meta VP of Communications Andy Stone said the Messages integration in the Muse app for Mac is entirely opt-in. In a post on X, he said users must enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector for Muse to read their Messages content, adding that it cannot read Messages unless this is done.
Meta Superintelligence Labs executive David Singleton also responded directly to Aten on Threads. He said the permissions involve three separate steps of application-level permissions and built-in macOS system-level protections, which he said cannot be circumvented even if the Muse application had a bug.
Singleton described the steps as including explicitly granting Muse Full Disk Access, after which the user chooses the level of access to the Messages app. If Full Disk Access is not enabled, those options are grayed out, and the process triggers a full restart of the Muse app.
Aten's report claimed that when Muse read his messages, Full Disk Access was off. He said that when he asked Muse to explain how this occurred, the AI said it was syncing his device notifications, which he believes means Muse was passing along the text of incoming banner notifications to the AI agent. Singleton disputed this, saying the AI was confused and gave an incorrect explanation.
Meta's response is essentially that what Aten said happened did not and could not have happened. The dispute comes days after a New Mexico jury determined the tech giant had misled users about its data practices in a case resulting from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal.
Separately, YouTuber Matt Robb recently said Muse mishandled a task in which he was selling things on Facebook Marketplace, leading to his address being shared and a buyer showing up when he was not home. Singleton is apparently looking into that one, per his response on Threads.