Meta’s Muse creates dossiers on users and their contacts — TIME
Meta’s AI assistant Muse creates and updates every hour dossiers on its users and people they mention in chats, messages and emails read by the assistant. TIME reports this, citing an analysis of the service’s internal instructions. These profiles record information about social connections: how people met, their shared interests, disputes, as well as tensions and alliances within a communication group.
Analysis of behavior and contacts
According to the publication, such mapping may also include people who do not use Muse themselves if other users talk about them. The instructions also stipulate that the assistant must adapt communication to the user, paying attention to inside jokes, memorable phrases and shared context.
Muse must identify users’ goals, including those they have not explicitly voiced, and assess which prompts are most effective for them. An example in the internal instructions cites a conclusion that a user responds better to short reminders after 10 p.m. Every evening, agents analyze the day’s conversations.
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Meta’s position and data access
A Meta spokesperson did not dispute TIME’s findings and said that Muse remembers information important to a person, including data about other people that the user chose to share, in order to be a useful personal assistant. The company says that each assistant operates in a separate virtual machine in Meta’s cloud, and that data are not transmitted to the advertising system or other Muse agents.
At the same time, the internal instructions provide for transmitting anonymized conclusions to Meta to improve the product — for example, about when an assistant’s reminders are most persuasive. Meta said the transfer takes place after names and other identifying information are removed, and that these data are used to improve the product rather than transferred directly between individual virtual machines. The company also plans to offer data encryption later this year, but this option is currently unavailable.
Users can export Muse files and view internal instructions and session logs through the service’s file browser. Meta claims that a person can instruct the assistant to forget specific information. At the same time, according to TIME, this does not necessarily delete the original message from the chat, and Muse’s instructions include a directive not to tell the user about this.
