A single Inc. column asked whether Meta’s Muse agent had read a user’s private messages. The company’s answer was immediate and firm, and it has not settled the question.
Jason Aten, a columnist at the magazine, described the issue. Meta’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, replied on X that the Messages integration in the Mac build of Muse is entirely opt-in. Both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector are required before the app can read anything, he wrote.
David Singleton, an executive at Meta Superintelligence Labs, went further on Threads. Reading messages takes three separate application-level permissions on top of built-in macOS protections, he said, and those protections cannot be circumvented even if the app had a bug.
Suspicion persists because of the company’s history. Meta has faced lawsuits, FTC violations and fines over consumer data, and days ago a New Mexico jury found it had misled users about its data practices in a case originating from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica breach.
Muse is still the top app on the App Store, and Meta’s consumer AI lead rests on it. Whether the product’s own explanations land is now part of what the company is selling.
The response has been mostly defensive. Aten has not said how the messages were read, and Meta has not said whether it will look into the incident with him.
