Meta Muse: “It’s Really Just Fun and Cute.”
September 26th, 2026Before looking at Muse, let’s take a brief walk down memory lane with Mark Zuckerberg.
First of all, there’s Facebook’s proximity to DARPA LifeLog:
LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). According to its bid solicitation pamphlet in 2003, it was to be “an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities”. The objective of the LifeLog concept was “to be able to trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life in terms of events, states, and relationships”, and it has the ability to “take in all of a subject’s experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone”.
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The LifeLog program was canceled on February 4th 2004, the same day Facebook was launched, after criticism concerning the privacy implications of the system.
Then there’s Zuckerberg referring to Facebook users as, “Dumb fucks,” for trusting him with their data.
Next we could spend the next few several months going over endless privacy disasters with Facebook and other Meta products.
Now let’s turn to what Mark Zuckerberg has in mind for us going forward. Because he assumes that you suffer from total ignorance and/or amnesia, he wants you to let his, “Fun and cute” AI crawl through all your email, photos and data to act as as your personal assistant. Give it your credit card information and let it buy things for you.
Yes, really!
You might be thinking, “Who cares if the average idiot sees Zuckerberg’s Tamagotchi on steroids and wants it? I don’t want it. I won’t use it.”
Well, here’s the problem: That thing is meant to take input from phones, Meta glasses that contain cameras and microphones and a literal Tamagotchi-type device that will also contain cameras and microphones.
Remember Facebook’s shadow profiles?
Early in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a congressional hearing that Facebook collects information on people who are not Facebook users. To be clear, Facebook does not use the term “shadow profile,” but that’s become the common term for information collected on people who are not Facebook users. (It can also refer to data collected about people who are users, but the information in question was not provided by them.) Instead, it comes from third-party sources. In other words, whether you’re a Facebook user or not, the company knows things about you that you did not explicitly tell it.
Forget about the people who will use these technologies on purpose. They’re already gone. You’re wasting your time trying to explain anything to them. If they believe Meta’s privacy claims about Muse, they probably thought that getting injected with an experimental gene therapy in a parking lot in exchange for a jelly donut was a good idea.
The point here is that Zuckerberg’s AI sensor platforms are going to be wandering around on the general public and maybe even on your friends and family members. Information you have shared with users of Muse is going to end up back at Meta.
My guess is that a core undocumented feature of this involves gathering up as much information as possible on those of us who are trying to stay off this Zuckerberg’s plantation:
Meta is accelerating investments in frontier AI and personal superintelligence, a theoretical milestone where machines outthink humans. Zuckerberg is going all in to build data centers for those projects, as well as the energy capacity to support them.
“Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” he said in a post on Threads.
Under the new effort, the enormous amount of computing power target will consume as much electricity as small cities or even small countries at a time when concerns around exploitation of resources like water have risen.
“It’s really just fun and cute.”
Via: Tech Radar:
The more I engaged with Muse, the more the tandem senses of convenience and discomfort grew. Muse feels more frictionless than similar services with virtual browsers. And the combination of data Meta already has and the data it required permission to access made it feel more personal, too. Every improvement in its ability to help me came with another small moment where I had to decide how much access I was willing to grant.
Meta says conversations and VM data are not shared with its advertising systems, although browsing activity performed on your behalf can still influence advertising indirectly because websites may treat Muse’s visits as your activity. Meta says sanitized agent interactions and tool activity can be used to train future models, but users can opt out with a switch in Muse’s settings. Meta is also developing a Confidential VM mode intended to cryptographically prevent even Meta from accessing information inside the VM.
I was more impressed with Muse than I expected. But that only made me warier about it. Digital chores that consume more time than any one of them deserves are all too common at the moment, and Muse proved remarkably good at stepping into that gap. The catch is that the closer it gets to behaving like a genuinely useful personal assistant, the more personal information it needs to do the job.
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