Meta is refuting a journalist's claim that its AI agent Muse read the user's private messages without permission. Following an earlier report from Inc. columnist Jason Aten that detailed the issue, Meta VP of Communications Andy Stone pushed back , making it clear that the company does not believe its product did this without the user's consent. "The Messages integration in the Muse app for Mac is entirely opt-in," Stone wrote on X in response to the claims made by the piece. "You have to enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector for Muse to be able to read your Messages content.
It can't read your Messages unless you do this. " Despite Meta's denial, many people are still suspicious that Meta isn't being truthful. That's not surprising , given the tech giant's years of mishandling consumer data , which has led to lawsuits , FTC violations , and fines . Just days ago, for instance, a New Mexico jury determined the tech giant had misled users about its data practices in a case that resulted from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal. Whether users can trust Muse will be a deciding factor in whether or not Meta wins the consumer AI market.
Although its app is faring well now, and remains No. 1 on the App Store, Meta's reputation may not recover if more reports like this emerge, true or not. If anything, the company should be engaging with the journalist directly to determine how this could have possibly happened, instead of just denying that it did.
Stone's official statement from Meta follows a more technical reply from Meta Superintelligence Labs executive David Singleton, who responded directly to Aten on Threads, explaining that the set of permissions a user must grant to let Muse read their messages on the Mac involves "three separate steps of application-level permissions and built-in macOS system-level protections. " He said these "can’t be circumvented even if the Muse application had a bug.