There's a growing trend in the consumer tech world: gadgets designed to spy on everything and everyone around you, regardless of whether or not anyone else actually consented to it. Now, with the advent of "AI personal assistants" like Meta's Muse, you're being cheerfully asked not just to give up your own data, but also the information of your friends, family, the person you went on a Hinge date with five years ago - and virtually anyone else you've ever come in contact with.

Since Muse was released last month, the agent has already been downloaded millions of times and hit No. 1 on Apple's App Store. With the help of its creepy virtual av …

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In April of 2025, Elgin Community College had six Flock safety cameras installed to "enhance the safety and security of students." But by September of that year, the school's administration grew concerned that Flock was sharing data with Customs and Border Patrol, that camera feeds were not properly secured, and that both law enforcement and the company's employees were abusing access to the data.

So in October of 2025, Elgin Community College requested Flock to remove its cameras. According to Elgin's President Peggy Heinrich, Flock rejected the request, saying it had not violated its contract. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, school o …

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At this year's OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company's new AI agent Dots - and told the crowd that the company wants to "set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI." OpenAI would spend the day taking veiled shots at Meta's Muse, its primary competitor, for failing to keep users' data safe. Yet Muse itself, a couple of months earlier, had launched as a supposedly safer alternative to predecessor OpenClaw - with CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising it was "built from the ground up for privacy and security."

In an age when companies hoard customers' personal data and cyberattacks are a dime a dozen, AI labs are trying to convince user …

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