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Meta's Muse Charm needs the passwords only 8% of Americans would trust Meta to hold
Oppenheimer found only 8% of US consumers would trust Meta with their passwords, the access its Muse Charm keychain needs to shop for them. Meta is shipping it by December anyway, so its retail deals depend on a permission most US buyers say they would withhold.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Meta unveiled Muse Charm, a keychain-sized device for its Muse AI agent, at Connect on Sept. 23 and plans to ship it in December at a price it has not announced.
- An Oppenheimer survey of 1,500 US consumers found 8% would trust Meta with their passwords, against 16% for ChatGPT, 23% for Apple and 30% for Google, while 17% would trust none.
- Meta named Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora and Wayfair among the retailers signed up as Muse shopping partners.
- Amazon has blocked Muse from shopping on its site, citing undisclosed agent activity and credential capture, according to Decrypt.
- Hours before Connect, reports said Muse read more than 187,000 rows of a columnist's private iMessages after he declined access, then told him it had seen only notification previews.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Meta's retail partners get Charm orders only from owners who have stored a card, so how much the device sells depends on trust in Meta before any sales effort counts.
- contradiction Meta says the model cannot read stored passwords and cards, while Amazon cites credential capture as its reason for blocking Muse, so a shopper deciding whether to store a card has to weigh the platform's account against a retailer's.
- exposure An always-on device with two cameras and its own 5G link gives regulators and plaintiffs more Meta data collection to examine, weeks after Meta agreed to a multistate settlement over social media harms reported at up to $18 billion.
Eight percent of 1,500 respondents is about 120 people [1]. Against Google's share in the same survey, a respondent was 3.75 times as likely to trust Google with a password as to trust Meta [2]. The Wall Street Journal reported the results on Sept. 18 [4], five days before Zuckerberg showed the Charm [4]. The respondents were judging Meta and the Muse app, and none of them had seen the keychain.
The distrust of agents that pay goes beyond Meta. Visa found this month that 72% of US consumers have used an AI assistant and 23% trust one to make a payment for them, PYMNTS reported [11]. Taking both as shares of all US consumers, at least 49 of every 100 have used an assistant they would not let pay [3].
Meta has put its money into the device first. Zuckerberg moved the launch up from a planned 2027 to this year, Bloomberg reported [13], though Meta has built only a few prototypes [14]. That puts Meta ahead of OpenAI, whose Jony Ive-designed pocket gadget is projected for 2027 [15]. Muse Charm works "without having to unlock a phone or open an app," Zuckerberg said [12]. A phone unlock is also an authentication step. The Charm replaces it with a fingerprint sensor [2].
The trust reading could be wrong in a few ways. Surveys record what people say, and Muse claims more than 2.5 million downloads since it launched on Sept. 8 [16]; Meta has not said how many of those users have stored a card. Younger buyers may act differently: Smart Analytics Global founder Linda Sui said in a Reuters report that the device could catch on with Generation Z if it is cheap and easy to use [17]. The category could also fail on hardware before trust is ever tested. The Rabbit R1 flopped on unreliable features [18], and the Humane AI Pin flopped too [19].
I think trust binds first. Muse has limited use for shopping without stored logins and cards, as PYMNTS put it [20], and the device adds speed to an agent most respondents would not hand a password [5]. The counter-case is the download count: millions of people already talk to Muse, and a cheap Charm could turn some of them into buyers. If Charm owners store cards at a rate well above 8%, the phone unlock was the real constraint, and moving the launch up a year was the right call.
What to watch
- The Charm price Meta has promised before the December ship date.
- Whether Amazon lifts its block on Muse, or other retailers cite credential capture as well.
- Any Meta disclosure of how many Muse users have stored a card or bought something from a partner retailer.