Friends don’t let friends feed their data to AI agents
The Verge Janus Rose
Meta’s Muse wants your data — and your friends’ too. It’s already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple’s App Store.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Janus Rose — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
The new trick in consumer tech is simple and a little gross: don’t just hand over your own data, hand over everybody else’s too. That’s the pitch behind AI personal assistants like Meta’s Muse, which asks users to feed it information about friends, family, and even the person from a Hinge date five years ago.
Muse only came out last month, but it has already been downloaded millions of times and climbed to No. 1 in Apple’s App Store. That’s a fast rise for a product built on a pretty uncomfortable premise: the more it knows about you, the more it can vacuum up about everyone around you.
And that’s the part that should make people pause. The old privacy bargain was bad enough when a gadget was only listening to its owner. Now the device is being sold as helpful while quietly turning your social circle into raw material.
The Verge’s framing is blunt for a reason. Consumer tech keeps getting better at spying, and AI agents make the whole thing feel friendlier instead of less invasive. That’s a neat product trick. It’s also exactly the sort of trick that makes people wish consent still meant something.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the ugliest kind of AI hype: the kind that treats other people as collateral damage. A model can be open or closed, clever or clumsy, but if its business model depends on dragging in everyone who never agreed to join, it’s not an assistant — it’s a boundary problem with a friendly logo.
Read more about this at: The Verge
