Meta Muse exposes users' personal and business secrets when they share conversations

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A single query is all that’s required to find thousands of conversations listed by title.

Muse, the new general-purpose AI agent from Meta, can expose sensitive information when users share conversations through Web links, researchers reported Monday.

Like many online services, Muse allows users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.

Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others.

“If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. “It took one query.”

The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services.