The Muse assistant from Meta incorrectly explained its own data access on macOS

Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted screenshots on Threads of a conversation with the Muse assistant from Meta in the macOS app, which is supposed to have access to Messages, Calendar and Notes. The assistant asked him about the content of a specific message conversation, although Aten claims that he had not granted the assistant access to his messages.

When asked how it knew about the message's content, Muse initially replied that it had only seen notification previews, not the message history. When asked further how it obtains notification previews, the assistant could not describe the precise mechanism – it said that it did not know the "exact plumbing", only that the paired Mac app makes notifications available as one of its features and that the data reaches it through device synchronization.

David Singleton from Meta Superintelligence Labs explained in response to the thread that data access is opt-in and requires explicit user permission, including granting full disk access in the Mac app. According to Singleton, Muse does not continuously monitor notifications on the Mac, but only synchronizes data from Messages after the user gives explicit consent. According to Meta, the actual problem was that Muse described its own operation incorrectly and confusingly in its response to Aten – it was not a case of unauthorized reading of messages. The company apologized for the incorrect response and said it was working to improve how Muse describes its own internal operation.