Meta's Muse App Opts Users Into AI Training Data Collection, Pushes Bank and Passport Sharing

Meta's newest consumer app, Muse, arrives with a data policy that enrolls users in AI training by default and prompts them to supply bank account details, email addresses, and passport information, according to a Wired review of the product. The setup extends a pattern the company has followed across its recent AI releases, where participation in data collection is treated as the starting position rather than an opt-in choice. For users who install Muse expecting a creative or productivity tool, the trade is not framed as a trade at all.

The specifics matter more than the framing. Wired's account describes an app that asks for financial and identity credentials that go well beyond what a typical AI assistant needs to function. Bank account numbers, email access, and passport scans are the kind of records that carry real consequences if mishandled, and they are the same categories regulators have scrutinized at Meta before. Meta has not publicly detailed how Muse stores or uses those documents, which leaves users to weigh the request on trust alone.

This is not an isolated decision inside Meta. The company has spent the past two years folding AI training clauses into the terms of its consumer products, from social feeds to messaging, and has faced pushback in Europe over how it handles user data for model development. Muse reads as the next step in that strategy rather than a departure from it. The app's defaults put the burden on users to dig through settings if they want out, and many will not.

Meta is far from alone in wanting more data. Competitors including Google and OpenAI have signed licensing deals and adjusted consent flows as they chase fresh training material, and the industry's appetite for personal data has only grown as model capabilities plateau on public web text. What sets Meta apart is scale: it already holds social, messaging, and advertising data on billions of people. Adding identity documents from a new app widens that pool in ways that are hard to reverse once the data is ingested.

The unanswered question is enforcement. Regulators in the EU and UK have shown willingness to challenge default data collection, and a passport scan is a harder sell than a browsing history. Watch whether Meta publishes specifics on retention and deletion for Muse, and whether privacy authorities treat the app's onboarding as consent or as something closer to coercion. Until then, the safe assumption for users is that Muse collects first and explains later.