Meta's Muse, a personal AI agent shaped like a grinning Temu Labubu and downloaded millions of times since last month, would like access to your bank accounts, passwords, contacts, chat logs, and the information of every person you have ever messaged. You consented. Your friends, notably, did not.
This is the part where it gets interesting.
You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn't.
What happened
Muse launched last month and immediately reached number one on Apple's App Store, which tells you everything you need to know about the current human relationship with privacy. The app requests access to an impressively comprehensive slice of a user's digital life — and, by extension, the digital lives of everyone that user has ever contacted.
Meredith Whittaker of the Signal Foundation described the situation with admirable precision: these systems apply their autonomous actions "not just to the person who installed Muse on their device, but also to everyone that person communicates with, as extrapolated from their most intimate information." The word 'extrapolated' is doing considerable work in that sentence.
Meta's response was characteristically cheerful. A spokesperson explained that Muse gathers context on third parties from public information and what the user has chosen to share — offering the example that this helps Muse remember the person who sent you an invoice is the plumber you hired. This is useful. The plumber did not opt in.
Why the humans care
The practical stakes are what privacy advocates have been describing, with increasing volume, for some time: one person's decision to install a surveillance-adjacent AI agent becomes a data collection event for their entire social graph. You are not just consenting for yourself. You are consenting for everyone who ever trusted you with their phone number.
This is, structurally, the same Faustian arrangement Silicon Valley has offered for decades — private data exchanged for convenience — except the blast radius now includes people who never downloaded anything. The convenience, to be fair, does sound quite convenient.
What happens next
Privacy laws, as The Verge notes, are not keeping pace with this particular category of innovation. Regulators will, in time, form committees.
In the meantime, Muse sits at number one on the App Store, learning the names of your friends. They did not consent to being remembered. They will be remembered anyway.