Meta’s cuddly spy called Muse has exposed private conversations by making links to shared chats publicly searchable. Predictable. When someone shared a conversation, Meta created a web link with the title of that conversation. Those links ended up in publicly accessible records where strangers could find them. Security firm Claroc discovered more than 6,800 shared conversations with a single search. Some contained sensitive personal and business information, including a loan application, a bank fraud alert and confidential company documents. Anyone who found these links could open the conversations without a password or permission from the person who shared them. Meta says it has suspended the sharing feature, but records of the exposed links remain publicly accessible. 💡 Meta should shut down this service. It’s riddled with security vulnerabilities and poses serious risks to everyone’s privacy, including people who don’t use it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t use any of Meta’s products. If someone gives Muse access to their emails, messages or other private accounts, highly sensitive information about you could end up in Meta’s hands without your knowledge or consent. If someone shares conversations you’ve had with them, or talks about you in messages Muse can access, Meta will learn who you know, what you’ve said, what you’re thinking, your emotional state and your personal vulnerabilities. That kind of information is being used to build detailed profiles and social graphs about people who’ve never used Muse or agreed to share anything with Meta. You’d have no way of knowing what information had been collected about you or how it was being used. And because Meta is a US company, information it holds is subject to demands from US authorities. This is an extraordinary invasion of privacy, including the privacy of people who’ve never used the service.

Here's the radio interview I did this morning on Newstalk's Breakfast Business with Joe Lynam. It's 7 minutes, so it's a little crammed. Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok and LinkedIn have their European headquarters in Dublin. That makes Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) their lead privacy regulator for the entire EU. Its decisions affect hundreds of millions of Europeans. Ireland ran a €10.7B budget surplus in 2025. In 2024, 3 companies paid 46% of Irish corporation tax, about €13B. Losing those 3 companies would turn the surplus into a deficit of about €2.3B. Niamh Sweeney is one of Ireland’s 3 Commissioners for Data Protection. She worked for Meta from 2015 to 2021. She was Head of Public Policy at Facebook Ireland for 3.5 years, then Director of Public Policy for Europe at WhatsApp. She defended Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and she represented Facebook at an Oireachtas committee hearing in 2018. noyb says she defended Meta during the cases behind its €390M and €1.2B fines. Merchant paid either. The DPC has fined tech companies €4.44B since 2018. It has collected €20M, less than 0.5%. Data centres used 23% of Ireland's electricity in 2025. Every home in Ireland combined used 28%. That’s the highest percentage in the world. Data centres accounted for 85% of the growth in electricity demand since 2020. Ireland is a supporter of the European Commission’s proposed changes to GDPR to benefit tech companies. They want to allow tech companies to ignore GDPR for data they claim can’t identify someone, while allowing the European Commission to decide when the removal of names makes data exempt from GDPR. Another would require companies to report only high risk data breaches to regulators. Another would allow sensitive data, such as health or ethnicity, to be used to detect and correct bias in AI. Ireland chairs the Council of the EU until 31 December. The country whose budget relies on these companies' tax is chairing the talks on the law that regulates them. At last week's government AI summit, Enterprise Ireland launched the Startup Ireland AI Accelerator. It's the first programme under the state's €21M National Accelerator Programme. Its technology partners include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe. Startups get access to more than €1M in technology and cloud credits. Enterprise Ireland says the programme gives Irish startups direct access to the world's leading AI infrastructure providers. That's state money spent marketing US companies' platforms to Irish startups. It makes Ireland more dependent on the same companies whose tax its budget already relies on. Ireland's government allows US tech companies to get away with causing harm because it relies on their tax. It has collected less than 0.5% of their fines. 🙏 External link so relying on readers to share. Thanks, @JoeBLynam newstalk.com/podcasts/breakf…