alt Hacker NewsMeta's Muse Is an Adorable Privacy and Security Dumpster Fire
Comments
I get the appeal of agents, I do. This is the future stuff we always wanted. But I cannot get myself to give one of these things access to my bank account or allow it to do price comparsion and shopping without oversight. Or access to my email or chat history.
I just do not trust any of them, not with my money or with access to my conversations.
It's very simple. There is ZERO chance the worlds biggest advertising companies will refrain, long-term, from using your most intimate secrets, gathered through your many conversations with their AI personal assistants, to sell you things.
[delayed]
Are all of these just flavors of "the agent has the same permissions as the user"? Not that I want to trust Meta with anything, but I'm guessing it asked for "root" access and the users granted it...?
Just remember that Meta (née Facebook) changed the entire Facebook feature set and feed style in search of greater engagement and clickbait so that you would do what was best for it rather than satisfy your preferences. And if you liked it more the old way, tough luck. Your feed is now a stream of rage-bait, half-dressed women, and engagement slop instead of a way to keep in touch with acquaintances.
No way I would allow them to develop the agent that runs my life. Even if it works well now, the rug pull is absolutely inevitable.
[I was never all that into facebook, but it was nice to see old high-school friends' grandchildren once every month or two. Now its completely unviewable.]
> Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages
Can someone explain how this is possible? If an app can do this without Full Disk Access or a popup of some kind that's a way bigger lapse on Apple's part than Meta's.
Isn't that Meta's entire product line?
>When one tech YouTuber put Muse in charge of their Facebook Marketplace sales, it sold his stuff way below acceptable rates
Why are we depending on LLM "reasoning" to negotiate a price rather than just having the user enter a lowest acceptable price deterministically?
It’s interesting that the only ads I’ve seen for Muse don’t mention meta at all.
Couldn't pay me to use this junk.
Trying to think of a number that I would consider it, and honestly $1k/month wouldn't convince me unless
- I have root on device
- device is on its own vlan, fully segmented
- !(SIM || 5G antenna)
- no google/apple id authenticated on device
- terminate agreement at any time without cost
I'm probably forgetting/not aware of ten things I should consider.
I can finally relax and let a random number generator make my decisions for me
The model is decent and cheap under contributor version but no way I’m letting meta AI anywhere near anything that matters in my life.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Why would you trust Meta with privacy and security?
And it's all by design, Meta and its founder have a long history of releasing products with security "flaws" that are immediately used by them to collect vast amounts of information about their victims.
Every social media & AI company is also a surveillance company. Targeted advertising doesn't work w/o mountains of behavioral data aggregated across all of Meta's & Google's software "products".
I understand that a typical HN user is very different from the average person.
However, surely by now even the lay people who have seen the testimonies before Congress, the lawsuits and the excesses by Meta execs over and over again ought to be atleast somewhat wary of handing them more personal data?
I think the average person has very similar self preservation instincts as the rest of us. So it can't be that. Which leaves the fact that there are lot of people who don't know about the above mentioned scandals galore that Meta has been involved in?
Does anyone remotely interested in AI use Muse out of explicit choice?
Facebook is like Microsoft at this point: The thing your grandparents use.
Even if they make something technically superior for a while, like what the Zune was to the iPad, tHey'll never really be cool.
and they'll certainly never be trusted.
Oh Meta not giving a damn about privacy and security? Say it ain't so.
Facebook is like Microsoft at this point: The smelly thing your grandparents use.
Even if they make something technically superior for a while, like what the Zune was to the iPad, tHey'll never really be cool.
Since this is mostly a collection of links to previously discussed articles:
Related:
Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937631
Meta’s Muse has a serious 0-day
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49802030
Unsurprisingly, Meta's new Muse AI agent blatantly ignores users permissions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893709
Maybe don't let Muse run your Facebook Marketplace account
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875006
What Meta got right with Muse
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946526
Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
-Mark Zuckerberg
[dead]
I’m pretty frustrated with Muse and the last thing I want to be doing with my free time is defending Meta, but this is such clickbait.
Point by point:
> “OMG you can jailbreak it and get it to spill its VM”
This is the whole point; any content on the VM is yours. It runs in an isolated sandboxed VM separate from stored credentials etc; this is effectively your own computer. You don’t have to trick it.
> It collects dossiers on your contacts
These are more text files that live on your private VM, alongside memory.md, etc. Do you want your secretary to forget every person you contact every day?
> It accessed Messages without full disk access
This whole story never made sense or was substantiated. Full disk access is an OS level security boundary; the user had to switch this on.
> It sold some guys stuff for too cheap and gave out his address
OK this one I basically believe, haha. Because this is the problem with Muse: the LLM is just too dumb to perform complex tasks effectively in many cases.