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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