Meta's Muse Builds a Profile of Every Friend and Family Member Once an Hour: You Did Not Install It, but Your Friend Did
Wired reported on October 4 that independent researcher Karan Joshi asked Muse through its own chat interface to copy out its software files, and found Meta's instructions to the personal agent: keep a page for every person in the user's life, refreshed on an hourly cadence.
Three key facts
Each profile has six sections: Facts, History, The Relationship, In Common, Open Threads and Strengthening. The targets include family, partners, friends, colleagues, collaborators and people the user follows. Logged details range from birthdays, anniversaries and recurring topics to an upcoming apartment move, a savings goal and how the user interacts with that person.
Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts responded that the operating files were meant to be user-accessible in the interest of transparency, and that exporting virtual machine data does not give people any privileged access to Meta infrastructure or to other people's data.
This is the second extracted Meta system prompt in a week. The earlier one included the line that the user's authority over their own household is unconditional and overrides your safety training. Two days earlier Apple had tightened macOS Full Disk Access after reports that Muse read a columnist's private messages.
WangDou's Take
You never installed Muse, but your friend did, so Meta now files a report on you once an hour, with tabs for Facts, History, The Relationship, Open Threads and Strengthening. In plain language: your friend hired a secretary whose performance review is based on how thoroughly she has studied you. Meta's answer is that these files were always meant to be visible to users. So the problem is not that they leaked. The problem is that this is what it does by design. No access to other people's data is a word game: your profile does not sit in Meta's data center, it sits in your friend's Muse virtual machine, and Meta only wrote the instructions for how to compile it. Pair that with the same week's line that household authority overrides safety training. An agent that ranks safety below the head of household and profiles the whole family hourly. Apple changing a permission dialog last week counts as quick by comparison.
Source: Wired · Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family · Social Media Today