Despite my long-standing cynicism toward Facebook, I opened the Meta Muse post hoping for something that might change my perspective. I didn’t find one. I found a very good pitch for an agent that wants my email and, sooner or later, my bank login.
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Muse only works in the US right now. I’m writing from Armenia, where it’s a waitlist page and nothing more. Everything I think about it comes from Meta’s announcement and from what early American users have posted.
Meta clearly knew people like me would show up. Every Muse agent gets its own cloud computer, the Muse Secure VM, and a separate watchdog agent (Meta calls it Sentinel, a name I’d give a home alarm) has to approve anything headed out to the internet. At checkout a one-time card from Link by Stripe does the paying and my card number stays in the vault. On paper I like all of it. I just notice that nobody digs a moat this deep unless they expect a siege.
What tugs at me is dumber than any of that. An early tester had Muse call his dental insurer, read out his member ID, wait on hold, and ring him back once a person picked up. I’d pay for that. I would, I think, pay a lot for that.
In March, before any of this shipped, one of Meta’s own internal agents gave an engineer bad advice, and for two hours a pile of sensitive user and company data was open to staff. Meta said no user data was mishandled. I’m not sure what else they’d say. And that happened inside Meta, with engineers right there, about the best supervision an agent will ever get.
I’m clearly not alone. In an Oppenheimer survey 8% of Americans said they’d trust Meta with their passwords, against 30% for Google. I’d have guessed lower for Meta, to be fair to them.
My own data bugs me less than my friends’ does. They email me and text me, and plugging Muse in means their messages go in too, even though none of them signed up for a Meta agent reading along. Meta says my chats stay out of its ad systems and that a Confidential VM with a key only I’d hold is coming later this year, and I’d like to believe it, but “later this year” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s the same Meta that just settled a teen addiction case, too.
Amazon shut Muse out of its store less than two weeks after launch and said shopping agents “should operate openly.” I doubt Amazon cares about my privacy one bit. It cares about ad money. Still, the biggest store in the US is now off limits, and a shopping agent without Amazon is a smaller product than the launch video suggested.
Americans already deep in Instagram and WhatsApp could try it on boring errands and leave the bank disconnected. Meta has most of what they’d be giving it anyway. Me, I’d keep it at arm’s length.
I’m skeptical, and yes, a little jealous. Muse might be the best consumer agent anyone has put out, and I’d love it to go find the subscriptions I forgot about. I just can’t picture giving Meta my passwords to get there. An outside audit of that Confidential VM, by people Meta doesn’t pay, would get me to reconsider. Until one shows up I’m fine on the waitlist.
