Weeks after launch, Meta's Muse exposed thousands of private chat links

What happened

Meta has paused a feature in Muse, its AI assistant app, that lets you share a chat with someone through a link. Researchers at the security firm Claroc say they found more than 6,800 Muse links through public internet records and viewed hundreds of chats. They included a marketing company's revenue review, a small business owner's loan application and a workplace's full-year staff calendar. Meta says it's reviewing the report.

What's actually going on

Muse is Meta's AI assistant app. It launched in September, is only in the US and Canada for now, and has had 10.9 million downloads, says the research firm Sensor Tower. This is where the AI part matters. People use assistants like this to get real tasks done, so they often type in real details: revenue numbers, schedules, applications. One chat can end up holding a lot of private information in one place.

The share button makes a web page that anyone with the link can open. Meta says that's how it's meant to work. The problem, according to Claroc, is how the address was built. Muse made each address from the share's title, a short phrase describing the chat, plus a random ID. Claroc says the hostname, which is the name part of a web address, usually gave away what the page held.

Here's the twist. Web names get listed in DNS, the Domain Name System, which works as a directory for web traffic, and some of those records are public. Claroc says it pulled hostnames from public DNS records, and because the link carries the same title and ID, that was enough to rebuild the full link.

This has happened before. Shared chats from ChatGPT, Claude and Grok have shown up in Google Search. Meta says it paused sharing while it considers changes to how these links can be found. The source doesn't say whether links people already made still work.

In your life

My take: treat any share link from an AI app as roughly public, like posting it. If you used Muse to work through a loan, a budget or a job interview and then shared it, that's the kind of chat Claroc says it found.

Be careful about

Meta has paused sharing, but the source doesn't say whether old links were taken down or still open. And this isn't only a Muse problem. Shared chats from other AI apps have turned up in Google Search before.

Where to get it

There's nothing new to get, and sharing in Muse is paused for now. One small thing to try: next time any AI app offers a share link, read the chat's title and contents as if a stranger will see them, and leave out names, numbers and account details.