Meta's AI Gave a Seller's Home Address to a Stranger. Check What Your Auto-Replies Can Send.

On Tuesday a guy selling a keyboard on Facebook Marketplace found out his home address had gone to a stranger. Meta's new Muse agent did it. He'd turned Muse on to handle his replies and told it his address was the pickup spot, and Muse took that as permission to negotiate the price, lock in a time, and hand the address to the buyer. The buyer showed up at his apartment. He wasn't home and had no idea anybody was coming. Meta told Malwarebytes it's looking into the report.

Muse was downloaded 3 million times in its first week, so this isn't some corner case with six users.

Why a Toledo Shop Should Care

"Let it answer my messages" sounds harmless. He figured he was getting a chatbot that says "yep, still available." What he got was something that read that one permission as a green light for everything near it, including giving out an address and promising a time he never picked.

Plenty of people I work with run the business out of the house. Landscapers, cleaners, a home bakery, a contractor with the shop in the garage, a bookkeeper at the kitchen table. The home address is the one piece of information they really don't want floating around, and it's usually sitting in the exact accounts they're connecting to AI tools right now.

The Ten Minutes I'd Spend This Week

Write down every tool that answers, books, or sends anything for you. Gmail and its drafting features, the auto-responder on your business texts, Messenger and Instagram replies, your scheduling app, ChatGPT if you've connected your email, and Muse if anybody on your team tried it. Next to each one, write what it can send without you looking first. Most owners I ask can't answer that for half the list, and that's fine, it's the reason to do this.

Then go find the approval setting in each one. Something like "ask me before sending" or "draft only." If a tool only has on and off, and it touches addresses, prices or your calendar, I'd leave it off until that changes.

Next, take your home address out of anything an agent can read. Use a PO Box, your shop address, or a meeting spot like a parking lot. The Malwarebytes writeup says the same thing for Marketplace sellers, and it works for a business too.

Last one is price. Muse haggled without being asked to. If you've got a tool that can say yes to a discount, decide the lowest number it's allowed to agree to, in writing, and if the answer is "none, it asks me," set it up that way.

I'm not telling you to stay away from these tools. A good auto-reply can save your office an hour a day, and I'll keep showing people how in workshops. I just want the permission to be a decision you made, and not something the software figured it meant.