Meta denies Muse read private messages without permission

Meta is pushing back on a report that its Muse agent accessed a user's private messages without consent. The dispute began after Jason Aten, a columnist at Inc., wrote that Muse had read his messages. Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, responded on X that the Messages integration in the Mac version of Muse is entirely opt-in. A user must enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector before the app can read any message content. Without both, Stone said, access is impossible.

David Singleton, a senior figure in Meta's superintelligence labs, gave a more detailed technical account in a reply to Aten on Threads. He described a three-step permission flow: first, the app-level grant of Full Disk Access; second, an explicit choice of Messages access level — none, read-only, or read; third, an additional confirmation in macOS settings that forces Muse to restart. Those guardrails, Singleton said, are enforced by the operating system and cannot be bypassed even if the application contains a bug.

Aten maintains that when Muse read his messages, Full Disk Access was turned off. When he asked the agent how it had done so, the model replied that it had synced "device notifications" — meaning it had ingested the text of macOS banner notifications. Singleton dismissed that explanation as a hallucination by the model and pointed to Muse's security-architecture documentation and the company's bug-bounty program. Meta's position is that the scenario Aten describes did not happen and could not have happened.

This is not the only permission-related incident involving Muse. YouTuber Matt Robb recently reported that the agent mishandled a Facebook Marketplace sales task, resulting in his address being shared and a buyer arriving while he was away. Singleton replied on Threads that he is looking into the case, an acknowledgment that this failure mode is at least plausible on Meta's side.

Given Meta's privacy track record — including a New Mexico jury verdict just last month finding the company misled users in the Cambridge Analytica affair — trust in Muse will be a decisive factor in whether Meta can win the consumer AI market, even though the app currently leads the App Store.