After Meta Muse's Data Terms Backlash, a Developer Builds a Phone-Local Personal AI Agent
jonathancheckwise · reddit · 2026-09-27
Meta's Muse and the viral Instinct agent both run your life in the cloud, and reading their terms reveals real problems:
- A "perpetual and irrevocable" data license (including for training), revised on Aug 26 only after screenshots spread
- A user disconnected her Google account, yet three hours later the agent emailed an inbox summary — 36 messages still stored
- Someone emailed himself malicious instructions and the agent complied
- Muse runs on a "dedicated, secure computer" in Meta's cloud, with Meta allowed to use your queries by default; the off switch is hard to find
- Instinct raised a $250M Series B two days after the backlash
The author argues cloud agents must hold your life on a server, so he's building the opposite architecture:
- Model, memory, and index live on your phone; servers hold only four fields — email, seat number, subscription status, app version — small enough to print on the landing page
- Per-app Read / Draft / Send permissions, starting read-only and promoting as the agent earns trust
- Internet off by default, asked once per task, with refusal allowed
Early stage, 500 founding seats, first builds shipping in days, with the author inviting public critique of the architecture.
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