Meta's Muse AI pulls Amazon data, unnerves tester

Meta's launch of Muse arrives as the company's platforms are already under fire. A recent Futurism investigation found many Facebook accounts flooding the platform with videos depicting violent child abuse, and the article says Meta appears woefully unprepared and, judging by its ambiguously phrased policies, unwilling to do anything meaningful about it.

Against that backdrop, Muse's design asks users to link accounts like Gmail and Amazon so the assistant can handle tasks such as booking tickets, making appointments, or filling out forms. The Verge's Emma Roth found that once linked, Muse quickly assembled a detailed profile — including the state she was visiting family in, drawn from an Amazon shipping address — and listed her very specific interests beyond what Instagram's ad topics section reveals. Meta says the service runs on a secure "dedicated virtual machine" and keeps login credentials somewhere the AI agent cannot reach, but Roth's reaction suggests the company still has ground to make up on trust.

The outcome likely hinges on whether Meta can demonstrate that its technical safeguards actually work in practice, and on whether users decide the convenience of offloading mundane tasks is worth the access required. For people who already keep sensitive email and shopping accounts linked to their daily lives, that trade-off is the one to watch.