There is probably a page about you on a computer you have never seen. It has your name at the top. It has sections. One of them covers what your relationships need right now.
You didn’t write it. You didn’t agree to it. You may never have heard of the app that keeps it.
Meta’s new personal agent, Muse, was built to learn the people in its users’ lives. That includes friends, exes, colleagues and siblings who have never opened it. We know this because a researcher asked Muse to hand over its own files, and it did. Meta called that intended behavior.
The files are frank. Some of the instructions describe what Muse should remember. Others describe what it should say when a user asks it to forget. The two do not line up.
Meta has been here before. In 2018 it told the US Senate in writing that it does not build profiles on people without accounts. European courts and regulators have since taken a dim view of that sort of claim. Muse isn’t even available outside North America. That hasn’t kept Europeans off its pages.
We went through the files, Meta’s own help pages and the regulatory record. What they show about the people on those pages is worse than the export story suggested.