Meta’s Muse AI agent reportedly creates and updates a page for every person in a user’s life, recording details such as relationships, recurring topics and important dates. The finding raises a pointed privacy question: what does an assistant need to remember about people who never signed up for it?
Meta AI Watch analysis
What happened
Gizmodo reports that independent researcher Karan Joshi found Muse instructions through the app’s regular chat interface, and that The Future Society published instructions from an exported Muse virtual machine. The material describes pages that can include a person’s name and connection to the user, shared events, interaction patterns and the apparent state of the relationship.
Meta told Gizmodo that Muse gathers information from public sources and what users choose to share, and stores it in each user’s dedicated virtual machine. The company said other users’ agents cannot access that information. Read Gizmodo’s report.
Why it matters
An assistant that remembers a plumber’s connection to an invoice may be useful. A system that builds profiles of everyone around its user is doing something more consequential than keeping a tidy list of preferences. Those people may have no Muse account, no direct relationship with Meta’s assistant and little say in what it remembers about them.
The reported instructions describe what Muse is told to do, not an independent audit of what it records in practice or how well its safeguards work. Meta’s explanation is part of the story too: the company says the information comes from public material and what users share, and that the files are isolated by user.
Our read
Personalisation has a habit of expanding its guest list. The practical question is not just whether the assistant can remember useful context, but whether users can see, correct and delete profiles about people in their lives, and whether those people have any meaningful protection.
What to watch
- Whether Meta explains how users can inspect or delete relationship pages.
- What information Muse actually stores, and how long it keeps it.
- Whether Meta clarifies what controls people mentioned in those records have.
Discussion spark: Should an AI assistant be allowed to keep profiles about people who never use it, if that helps it serve its user?
Sources and evidence
- Meta’s Muse Is Collecting Information on Everyone in Your Life – Gizmodo (5 October 2026, 16:05 UTC)
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