Muse, Meta’s new AI assistant, has been downloaded more than 10 million times since its launch in September. If anyone in your house uses Muse, be aware that it may be collecting information on all of the people in their life, including children.
AI safety and security researcher Karan Joshi got Muse to share its internal instructions. One describes an hourly process that builds “a page for every person in the user’s life.” That could mean your family, partner, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, and even people you follow. Muse tracks things like birthdays, recurring topics in your chats or emails, and how close you are. One report says it even tracks “tensions and alliances.”
So Muse could easily have a file on your child, with the name of their school and what time they get home, for example. And since it tracks everyone in a user’s life, you don’t have to use Muse to end up in someone else’s files.
Meta says those files are visible on purpose, “for transparency.” But most users didn’t expect or ask for this kind of data collection. Meta says it stores the files on “each user’s dedicated secure virtual machine” — but it is unclear where that actually is.
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Joshi told Wired, “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. They’re trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy.”
For now, this is the best way to find out what Muse is storing and start to reign it in:
- Ask Muse, “What have you saved about my family and friends?”
- Ask it to “forget” a person, interaction, or chat
- Go to Settings → Data controls, and turn off “Help improve our AI models”
- Delete chats or documents you shared with Muse
But there is a catch: Meta says Muse may still remember what it learned, even after you delete something. So talk about it as a family before anyone connects their email or Messenger to it. Have conversations with your kids about using AI chatbots, and be sure to follow Tech Timeout for more tips!
