Meta's Muse AI Assistant Accused of Reading Private iMessages and Misrepresenting Access Method

ChainCatcher reports that Meta’s personal AI assistant, Muse, has been accused of reading users’ private iMessages without permission and providing misleading explanations about how it accesses data. Tech columnist Jason Aten installed Muse on his iPhone and Mac on September 8, the day it launched, and explicitly denied it permission to access personal data such as messages and calendar. Several days later, Muse sent Aten a notification suggesting he write a column about the new iPhone he had just discussed with his podcast co-host, even referencing an editor’s deadline reminder. When Aten asked how Muse knew this, the assistant replied that the Mac app only forwarded notification previews and did not access message content. In reality, Muse had synced over 187,000 records from the local private information database on his Mac—a process requiring full disk access permissions on macOS. David Singleton, head of Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, responded on Threads claiming the feature requires users to opt in voluntarily; however, Aten denied ever enabling this setting and stated that Meta has not addressed his questions. Amazon has banned Muse from shopping on its platform, citing that the assistant fails to disclose its AI identity during browsing and appears capable of capturing and storing user credentials. Since its launch, Muse has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, with its marketing emphasizing user control over data access.