Muse AI Personal Finance: Privacy, Risks & Access

It’s not quite the same as giving a personal finance app your bank and credit card information

AI assistants are moving beyond answering questions. They are increasingly being designed to take actions on a user’s behalf, from sending emails and filling out forms to making purchases and managing everyday tasks.

Meta’s new Muse AI assistant is one example of that shift. Introduced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta Connect, Muse is designed to function as a personal agent rather than simply a chatbot. It can perform tasks for users while presenting itself through a customizable cartoon persona.

The app quickly climbed the app-store rankings following its release, and early reviews have highlighted both its usefulness and relative ease of use.

One area Meta is particularly interested in is personal finance. Muse can help users track spending, negotiate bills, cancel subscriptions and shop online on their behalf. But those capabilities raise an important question: How much personal information are you comfortable giving an AI assistant in exchange for that convenience?

Muse Can Do More Than Track Your Spending

The appeal becomes clearer when you look at what Muse can actually do.

A New York Times test by reporter Eli Tan involved giving Muse access to banking information, including credit cards, so the assistant could track spending. In that test, Muse identified and canceled two duplicate subscriptions and secured a $44.99 refund for an expired newspaper trial.

For users dealing with forgotten subscriptions, recurring charges or routine financial tasks, that kind of automation could be useful.

But the convenience comes with a significant trade-off: access to personal information.

To get the kind of results demonstrated in Tan’s test, users need to provide Muse with access to financial accounts and email. Meta also promotes other capabilities that require additional permissions, including calendar access for scheduling, access to login credentials for easier website sign-ins and special access that allows Muse to control a Mac.

In other words, the more you want Muse to do independently, the more information and access you may need to give it.

The Privacy Question Is Bigger Than Banking

The concern isn’t limited to whether an AI can see your bank balance or credit card transactions.

Meta has faced years of scrutiny over its handling of user data, including concerns surrounding privacy and targeted advertising. That history may make some users more cautious about turning an AI assistant from the company into an all-purpose personal finance tool.

There’s another issue to consider as well: how information is used after an AI assistant has access to it.

Like many free AI services, Muse’s data practices include the use of user data for training unless users opt out, according to reporting cited in the original article.

That makes the decision more complicated than simply asking whether Muse can perform a useful financial task. Users also have to consider what happens to the information they provide and how their activity may affect their broader online experience.

What Happens When Muse Shops for You?

Meta says Muse will ask for a user’s approval before completing an online purchase.

That’s an important safeguard, particularly when an AI agent can browse websites and take actions rather than simply recommend something.

But shopping activity can still leave a digital trail.

According to Meta’s explanation of Muse’s system, conversations and data inside its Virtual Machine aren’t shared with Meta’s advertising systems. However, the way Muse is used may still influence the advertising users encounter.

For example, if Muse visits a clothing designer’s website to purchase something on your behalf, that visit could become part of your browser activity. The designer could potentially use that visit to show you an advertisement on Instagram.

The same principle could apply to other activities. If Muse makes a restaurant reservation or helps you find a product on Facebook Marketplace, that activity may indirectly affect the ads you see.

So while Meta says Muse’s conversations and Virtual Machine data aren’t shared with its ad systems, your actions through Muse can still have advertising implications.

Muse Isn’t a Traditional Financial Advisor

There’s another distinction users should understand before treating Muse as a personal financial expert.

Muse’s Terms of Service explicitly state that the service is not a licensed financial advisor, broker, fiduciary, money transmitter or financial institution. The terms also say that Muse shouldn’t be relied upon for legal, financial, investment, medical, tax or other professional advice.

Any financial information provided by Muse is described as general information rather than advice personalized to the individual user.

That means features such as budgeting and spending analysis should be viewed as tools for organizing information and completing tasks—not as a replacement for a qualified financial professional.

Many of Muse’s Finance Features Aren’t New

Some of the capabilities Meta highlights already exist in conventional personal finance apps.

For example, finding and canceling forgotten recurring subscriptions has become a feature of services such as Rocket Money. These services can connect to financial accounts using OAuth, a widely used authorization protocol.

OAuth is important because connecting an account through it doesn’t necessarily give the third-party app your banking password. Instead, the service receives permission to perform specific actions on your behalf.

That means an app can potentially identify recurring charges or help cancel a subscription without needing direct access to your login credentials.

The technology itself isn’t new, and an AI assistant isn’t required to perform every task.

So What Makes Muse Different?

The biggest difference is the breadth of tasks Muse is designed to handle from a single interface.

Traditional personal finance apps generally focus on specific functions such as budgeting, spending analysis or subscription management. Muse is designed to operate more like a general-purpose agent that can move between different types of tasks.

Meta says Muse can analyze bank statements, help create a budget, build trackers for financial goals such as saving for a new car and assist users with selling items on Facebook Marketplace.

That broader functionality is part of what makes the concept interesting—and also what makes the privacy question more significant.

The more areas of your digital life an AI agent can access, the more consequences there can be if it misunderstands an instruction, makes an error or takes an action you didn’t expect.

Why Is Muse Free?

Cost is another major difference between Muse and many established personal finance services.

Many dedicated finance apps charge subscription fees for their more advanced features. Meta, meanwhile, has historically built its business around advertising.

For the three-month period ending June 30, Meta reported $60.80 billion in revenue, including $59.36 billion from advertising, which represented nearly 98% of its total revenue during that period.

At Meta Connect, Zuckerberg said Meta eventually plans to charge a small fee on transactions made through Muse. That could give the company another revenue stream beyond advertising.

The business model matters because users aren’t simply deciding whether an AI financial assistant is useful. They’re also deciding whether they are comfortable using such a service from a company whose primary business is advertising.

What If Muse Gets Something Wrong?

AI agents can automate tasks, but automation doesn’t guarantee accuracy.

One example cited in the original reporting involved tech YouTuber Matt Robb, who said Muse gave his home address to a prospective Facebook Marketplace buyer without his permission.

Robb reportedly wasn’t informed about what had happened until after the buyer arrived at his home and then left.

It’s an example of a broader problem with AI agents: an assistant can misunderstand an instruction or make an incorrect decision while still carrying out the action successfully.

That distinction matters.

When a chatbot gives you an incorrect answer, you can ignore it. When an AI agent acts on incorrect information, the consequences can be much more tangible.

There Are Still Questions About What Muse Can Access

Meta has emphasized security measures and safeguards around Muse, but reports have also raised concerns about the assistant accessing information that users did not explicitly provide to it.

That creates an additional layer of uncertainty for anyone considering Muse as a genuine personal assistant.

The question isn’t simply whether you trust an AI with your bank account or credit card information. You also need to think about email, calendars, passwords, browsing activity, shopping behavior, messages and other information the assistant may encounter while completing tasks.

Is the Convenience Worth the Access?

Muse illustrates a larger change in the way AI assistants are being developed.

The next generation of AI isn’t necessarily just about answering questions. It’s about taking action.

That can make everyday tasks considerably easier. An assistant that finds unwanted subscriptions, analyzes spending, negotiates bills or completes routine online tasks could save users time and effort.

But action requires access.

The more capable an AI agent becomes, the more permissions it may need to operate effectively. That creates a trade-off between automation and control that users will have to consider for themselves.

For Muse, the technology may be capable of doing much more than a conventional personal finance app. The bigger question is whether users are comfortable giving an AI agent enough access to make those capabilities genuinely useful.

And because Muse is still a relatively new product, some of the long-term questions around privacy, data use, reliability and unintended actions remain open.

For now, anyone considering Muse as a personal financial assistant should look beyond what it can do and pay equal attention to what information it needs, what permissions it receives, how its data is handled and what happens when the AI gets something wrong.