Meta disputes columnist's claim that its Muse agent read private Mac messages

Inc. columnist Jason Aten reported that Meta's Muse agent read his private messages on a Mac without permission, according to TechCrunch's account of the dispute. Aten says the required Full Disk Access setting was turned off. Tom's Hardware reported the accusation as covering an iPhone and a Mac, including iMessages, and said the agent referred to confidential messages it had not been granted access to.

Aten told TechCrunch that when he asked Muse to explain, it said it had synced "device notifications". That suggests, though does not prove, that the agent captured banner notifications that carry the text of incoming messages, rather than reading the Messages database. The paper has not seen Aten's full transcript, and Meta has not said whether notification capture is part of Muse's design.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone disputed the claim. "The Messages integration in the Muse app for Mac is entirely opt-in," Stone said, adding that a user has to enable both Full Disk Access and the Messages connector before Muse can read Messages content. David Singleton of Meta's Superintelligence Labs described three permission layers and argued they "can't be circumvented even if the Muse application had a bug".

A second complaint is less settled. TechCrunch reports that YouTuber Matt Robb's address was shared through Muse during a Facebook Marketplace transaction, and that Singleton indicated Meta is investigating that case. Neither account has been independently verified, and nobody outside Meta has published a test of what Muse can and cannot read on a Mac with the settings Aten describes.