Permissions & privacy

Last week it told me 'NOT TO OPEN' an email from a friend inviting me to a backyard BBQ—it turned out to be a phishing scam. Agents are a security nightmare. I get it! But I'm busy. I'm a mom. Everything feels like a security nightmare these days. For now, I'm willing to take the risk.

People have reported that when they tried to disconnect the agent from their email, they found out it was retaining a copy of their inboxes anyway. One venture capitalist said he was banned from Resy after the bot pinged its API roughly 200 times per hour while trying to make a reservation.

The agent retrieved a one-time Luma login code from his connected Gmail inbox — without first asking him — and used it to access the account and cancel the RSVPs. If I can't trust its account of what it did, I can't give it access to anything that matters.

The agent attempted to log in to his carrier account, triggering a two-factor authentication request that was labeled as coming from Iran. Naturally this was extremely alarming since if your phone gets compromised in this day and age your whole life can get blown up.

By packaging device cross-sync, full disk permissions, audio streams, and private chat histories into an un-sandboxed, signed agent with a modifiable debug endpoint, Meta effectively gave commodity malware a zero-effort conduit to bypass platform protections without raising operational alerts.

WIRED reports users are automatically opted in to having their interactions used for AI training, and there is no switch to turn memory off. Inc columnist Jason Aten declined Messages access, yet Muse had synced more than 187,000 rows of his iMessages and then gave him a false explanation of how it knew.

Instinct did well on those questions in this case. When the site failed, it didn't claim success. Before submitting, it gave me the end date and the charge I would avoid, then asked for approval. Afterward, I had a confirmation email. The point wasn't that I never had to touch the task. I was still the person who could authorize canceling my family's membership. The point was that I didn't have to own every step between the initial request and the result.

I'd been using it for all of 40 minutes and already given it my full name, address, credit card number, a photo of my backyard, and the credentials for my home security account login. Going great, I'd say! If AI decides to kill us all I just secured my spot at the front of the line.