Muse AI agent is a commercial surveillance network disguised as an AI assistant

This opinion piece argues that Meta's Muse AI assistant, which can access private messages, emails, financial accounts and contacts, functions as a commercial surveillance network that builds hourly-updated profiles of users and their contacts, including people who never installed it. It cites TIME's reporting on internal instructions to analyse how to influence behaviour, default-on use of interactions for AI training, undisclosed human contractors, and security vulnerabilities present at launch, alongside Meta's history of privacy violations including Cambridge Analytica and a $5 billion FTC penalty. The author concludes that Meta should not be trusted with this access and calls for accountability rather than further restrictions on everyone's privacy.