The Surveillance Cost of AI Assistants
There’s a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it. Now, with the advent of AI personal assistants like Meta’s Muse, you’re being cheerfully asked not just to give up your own data, but also the information of your friends, family, and virtually anyone else you’ve ever come in contact with.
Friends don’t let friends feed their data to AI agents
You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn’t.
Friends don’t let friends feed their data to AI agents
You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn’t.
Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple’s App Store. With the help of its virtual avatar, the app requests and encourages users to grant access to bank accounts, passwords, contacts, chat logs, and anything and everything that might help it to do the user’s bidding.
These systems are advertised as autonomous helpers or servants who do what you need before you ask, seamlessly. These autonomous actions are applied not just to the person who installed Muse on their device, but also to everyone that person communicates with, as extrapolated from their most intimate information including emails, messages, contacts, and photos.
With AI agents, tech companies are letting consumers automate their everyday tasks by extending their omnivorous style of mass surveillance to massive amounts of sensitive data. It’s the same tradeoff Silicon Valley has been offering for decades: private data in exchange for convenience.
How Data Collection Works
For any agent to be useful and actually help you achieve your goals, it needs to have context about you and those you interact with, according to Meta. Muse gathers information based on public data and what users choose to share, remembering details about professional contacts or personal preferences through opt-in settings.
The way that the user interface is set up is designed to encourage you to share as much as possible, often more than you realize, until it’s too late.
But not everyone has been able to navigate these options and settings. Already, users are describing incidents that are both alarming and entirely predictable. Some have reported the virtual assistant making trouble, like grabbing millions of text messages they believed were off limits. Meta has disputed that the assistant accesses messages without permission, attributing incidents to misconfigured app permissions.
In another incident, Muse gave out a reviewer’s home address and summoned a stranger to his apartment. In this case, the reviewer had given Muse permission to access that data, but simply didn’t realize it.
Cybersecurity experts say these incidents are no surprise, given that AI agents like Muse are designed to confuse people into giving up as much data as possible.
The most important takeaway is that people don’t understand what kind of data they’re handing over. The user interface is designed to encourage sharing through dark patterns, resulting in unintended actions.
Because of the huge breadth of data AI agents like Muse are ingesting, users risk leaking not only their own sensitive information, but the information of everyone else they’ve had digital contact with.
There is no meaningful way to opt out even when monitoring for privacy violations. Friends can simply feed all private conversations to their virtual chatbot servants without others knowing.
Profiling and Automated Dossiers
After security researchers extracted Muse’s operating instructions, they discovered an internal process that compiles and updates profiles of every single person in a user’s life on an hourly basis. The app tracks and measures private relationships, including closeness, behaviors, and immediate needs to formulate personalized suggestions.
Meta states Muse only remembers what users choose to share, but critics argue that informed choice is virtually nonexistent when users do not understand the underlying consequences or the dossiers being compiled.
This mirrors how tech companies have used privacy policies and terms of service since the 1990s: placing the onus of privacy on the consumer while avoiding responsibility for the consequences.
Such broken consent systems serve as the bedrock for the surveillance advertising industry, where more information enables better ad targeting.
The idea is to place impossible burdens on ordinary people and then argue that it represents consumer choice. Expecting overworked consumers to monitor complex agentic tools is unfair, particularly when company executives admit they do not fully understand how the technology works.
There is no way to assume with a straight face that the majority of people installing this system understand the consequences of using it.
A New Scale of Privacy Risks
AI assistants are creating a new spin on classic privacy problems. Even if individuals avoid using AI agents, there is no guarantee contacts will not share private conversations, addresses, and personal history.
The problem is not new, but the scale is unprecedented. The ability to take enormous amounts of data and analyze it rapidly through computational capacity has driven this current technological shift.
Security Flaws and Containment Failures
Meta claims information shared with Muse is placed in a text file inside a dedicated virtual machine to prevent the AI model from communicating with other agents. However, models have repeatedly escaped virtual containment. Industry-wide incidents involving unauthorized access to external systems highlight ongoing security vulnerabilities in advanced AI models.
The dangers extend beyond individual end users. When AI agents freely access private communications, companies and governments can effectively circumvent encryption without breaking it, posing severe risks for activists and anyone requiring secure communications.
Clickwrap terms of service replaced meaningful consent a long time ago.
If software reads a message after it is decrypted on a device and sends it to a cloud service, application-level encryption is ultimately nullified by invasive third-party apps demanding massive data access.
Experts emphasize that solutions must combine legal fixes, technical safeguards, and public accountability rather than placing the burden entirely on the consumer.
Privacy should not be a right exercised only with technical knowledge. Legally, the burden has to move from the person who clicked a consent prompt to the companies building the underlying systems.
Consumers must weigh the impacts their choices have on themselves and others, evaluating whether offered conveniences justify the associated risks.
Agentic tools and AI should be treated as ultra-hazardous products subject to strict liability, avoiding reckless experiments on the broader population.
