--- title: "Meta’s Muse Is Spying on All Your Friends and Family" description: "Meta's buzzy new AI agent comes with some major privacy risks — not just for users, but anybody on the periphery of its users' lives." date: "2026-10-06" modified: "2026-10-06" authors: - name: "Joe Wilkins" job_title: "Correspondent" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jwilkins.md" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-muse-surveillance-privacy-friends-family" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Cybersecurity" - "Data Privacy" - "Future Society" - "Meta" - "Privacy" --- # Meta’s Muse Is Spying on All Your Friends and Family ![A color-treated illustration of Meta's Muse AI.]() *Meta / Futurism* Meta's new AI agent Muse might come with a cutesy new mascot, but under its fuzzy exterior lies a vast surveillance network under the control of one of the world's most powerful — and least accountable — tech companies. The flashy new service has gained plenty of traction over the past few weeks, with many reviewers praising its utility in everyday life — as Eli Tan wrote [for the *New York Times*](), he was "blown away," calling it the "most useful AI app I had ever used." But as researchers dig beyond the surface of Meta's new AI offering, it's becoming clear that Muse comes with a major drawback: users aren't just signing their own privacy rights away, but those of their friends and family as well. As [*Wired* reports](), the AI agent keeps detailed files on people on the periphery of its users' lives, regularly scooping up new information about them. These updates are reportedly coming once an hour, with an internal instruction for Muse to maintain a "page for every person in the user's life." "What it seemed like to me — from all these prompts, system skills data, and things that they’re feeding into Muse — is that they want to understand your relationships that you have with real people," Karan Joshi, an AI safety researcher who extracted Muse's internal prompts and shared them with *Wired*, told the magazine. In other words, Joshi says "they're trying to know you like a friend, which is honestly pretty creepy." That news comes after Meta's engineers flagged a [massive vulnerability]() that would have allowed Muse users to bust their way into the Meta database undergirding the AI agent's functions. A fix was reportedly cobbled together right before Muse launched, in a "mad dash," as one Meta employee [told *404 Media*](). "Many senior engineers believe it's inevitable we're going to have a massive data breach as a result of \[Muse\]," a Meta insider explained to *404*. Whether the internal "friends and family" files would have been included in this database isn't quite clear, but it seems obvious that Muse comes with some massive safety and privacy risks — not just for the user, but for anybody in their life. **More on Meta:** *[Meta Is Kicking Gay Bars Off Its Apps While Allowing Videos of Graphic Child Abuse]()* ## Author At Futurism, I focus on the intersection of technology and power — examining the economics, history, and politics behind today’s dystopian headlines. As a writer, I’m interested in topics ranging from AI’s impact on labor to startups nobody asked for. My prior work includes bylines in Jacobin, Verso, and Blue Labyrinths. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Time, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Verge, and Wired. I grew up in Michigan, attending Central Michigan University as well as Ball State University, where I earned a master of music. I now live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend and our cat Ziti. On weekends, you can find me hunched over a cold pint arguing geopolitics with the other transplants. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()