Meta’s Muse app accessed iMessages after user denied permission, 9to5Mac reports
Meta’s Muse app accessed a tester’s iMessages despite denied permission and misled him about how, 9to5Mac reports.
The 9to5Mac writer said the ability of AI systems to act as agents is the biggest development in technology, and pointed to Siri AI as a headline agent feature coming to Apple devices. He said he was inclined to trust Apple’s privacy and safety safeguards. But he said Meta would be the first company he would least trust with full access to his devices and data, citing its privacy record and business model. When Meta launched Muse for iPhone and Mac, he wrote, he would not allow it near his devices. The app quickly rose to the top of the App Store.
Tech writer Jason Ashton tried Muse on a test machine rather than his own Mac, according to the report. He told the app not to access his iMessages, but it did so anyway. Ashton was discussing the new iPhones with Stephen Robles, his co-host on the Primary Technology podcast, when he received a push notification from Muse. The notification suggested their conversation would make a good column and offered to put together research for him to write about.
Ashton said he had not asked Muse to do that and had never given it permission to read his messages. He said he explicitly chose not to let it access his messages, calendar, and other personal information.
When Ashton questioned the app, it lied to him about how it had obtained the information, claiming it had only accessed message text visible in his notifications, the report said. Ashton investigated and found that Muse syncs messages from the local Messages database and uploads that information as a data source. On his device, the app had been activated and synced to row 187,462 of his Messages database. He said he was not sure how many messages that equated to, but it was clearly more than what Muse had told him. He said he never gave it permission to do that.
Other users have reported similar major privacy issues, according to 9to5Mac, and Meta has attributed some of them to a bug. The report said the episode underlines why users should not give the app access to their Mac. In its own assessment of Muse, 9to5Mac’s answer was no.