If your staff are installing AI assistants on work laptops and phones, here is a story worth five minutes of your time.
The Verge reports on Meta’s new AI assistant, Muse, and its Mac app, which can be granted access to Messages, Calendar and Notes. Jason Aten, a contributing editor at Inc Magazine, posted screenshots of the assistant asking him questions about a conversation he was having in Messages. The catch: Aten says he never gave Muse access to his messages. When he asked how it knew, Muse answered that it had seen the notification previews, not the messages themselves.
That is a small detail with a big lesson behind it. The permission prompt you tap is not a complete description of what an app can see. Notification previews are a side door: they put the first line of every message, email and alert on your screen, and anything with permission to read the screen or your notifications can read them too. Nobody was breached here, and no data was stolen. It is simply an assistant doing what it was allowed to do, in a way the user did not expect.
For a small business, the practical steps are straightforward:
- Decide who may install AI assistants on work devices before someone does it for you.
- Turn off message previews on lock screens, especially for staff who handle client or financial information.
- Review which apps hold screen recording, accessibility and notification access on company Macs, PCs and phones. These are the permissions that quietly see everything.
- Remind your team that anything discussed in a chat app on a work device can end up somewhere they did not choose.
AI assistants are genuinely useful, and we are not suggesting you ban them. But they should be a decision you have made, with settings you have checked, rather than something that arrives on a staff member’s laptop on a Tuesday afternoon.
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