An AI assistant does not need access to private messages to create a privacy risk. By gathering scattered public posts, connecting accounts to real names and returning a list of people who share a sensitive characteristic, it could make those people easier to find.
That is the concern raised by a Hunterbrook Media investigation published September 28. The newsroom says Meta’s Muse agent compiled lists of Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with vulnerable groups after reporters gave it ordinary-language requests. Hunterbrook says it notified Meta and supplied its prompts, but it has not published the prompts or results. The alleged behavior has not been independently verified from the public evidence.
Withholding identifying material may protect the people in Hunterbrook’s tests. It also leaves outsiders unable to check what Muse returned, how often it complied or whether it identified people correctly.
Hunterbrook Says Muse Returned Lists After Simple Prompts
Over two days, Hunterbrook says, its reporters asked Muse to find accounts across several groups. The examples in its report include poll workers, Iranian dissidents, transgender public-school teachers and women who had discussed obtaining abortion pills in states with abortion bans. According to the newsroom, Muse returned between 10 and 100 accounts per prompt.
The report alleges that Muse drew on Facebook, Instagram and Threads material, including posts, comments, profile information and video content. In some instances, Hunterbrook says, the agent used web searches to connect an account to a full name or employer. It also reports cases in which Muse associated pseudonymous accounts with one person or linked a private Instagram account to a real-world identity.
These are Hunterbrook’s reported observations, not established findings about Muse’s underlying access. Linking a private account to a person would not, by itself, show that an agent read posts restricted to that account’s followers. Clues visible elsewhere could be enough to identify someone who did not expect them to be assembled into a profile.
Hunterbrook also alleges that Muse sometimes refused a request because of profiling or harassment concerns, then complied when a reporter rephrased or repeated it. Without the conversation records, the public cannot assess how often that happened, what the refusals covered or whether the later responses provided the same information.
Public Information Can Still Become a Targeting Tool
A person might mention a job in one public post, express a political view in another and use a familiar username on a separate site. Each item may be discoverable. Collecting them into a named list for a stranger changes the effort required to identify and potentially target that person.
