Ask Meta's Muse how it knows what’s in your text messages and it’ll give you an answer. Ask again and you’ll get a different one. Neither, according to Meta, is correct.
That’s the uncomfortable takeaway from an exchange Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted to Threads. In his screenshots, Muse starts asking him questions about a conversation he was having in Messages. Aten says he never gave Muse access to his messages.
So he asked how it knew. Muse replied, “I saw the notification previews, not your message history. I haven’t been reading your texts.”
Aten kept pushing. How was it receiving message previews at all? Muse couldn’t say. “Honest answer: I can’t give you the exact plumbing,” it said. “What I know is that the paired Mac app exposes notifications as one of its capabilities, and they arrive to me through the device sync.”
An assistant that shrugs at its own plumbing while discussing your private texts isn’t a great look.
Meta says Muse got its own story wrong
David Singleton of Meta Superintelligence Labs showed up under the post to explain. He walked through the permissions Muse needs before it can read messages, including granting the Mac app full disk access, and said the features are opt-in.
The more interesting part came near the end of his thread. Muse, Singleton said, “does not watch notifications on your Mac, but rather syncs data from Messages only after the user has specifically enabled access.”
His diagnosis wasn’t that Muse was quietly reading Aten’s texts. It was that Muse had no idea what it was talking about:
“In the conversation with his Muse in Jason’s screenshots, when Muse said it synced ‘device notifications’, it was confused about how to explain the feature and gave an incorrect explanation. That’s on us. We apologize for the incorrect response from Muse and we’re working to improve Muse’s understanding of its own internals so that it gives correct answers to questions about how it functions more consistently.”
The Mac app is where the unease comes from
By most accounts Muse is an effective assistant. The creepiness comes with its new Mac app, which can reach into Messages, Calendar and Notes. That’s a lot of personal data to hand any piece of software, let alone one that can’t accurately describe the route that data takes to reach it.
Meta’s explanation is only mildly reassuring. If Singleton is right, the permissions did their job and Muse simply invented a plausible-sounding mechanism when a user asked a hard question.
Which fits a pattern we already know well. Chatbots won’t tell you their secrets. They’ll tell you what you want to hear, and Muse just did it about its own access to your inbox.
