Elon Musk’s XChat Claims to Offer “private” Messaging (but Reserves the Right to Collect Your Data).
Elon Musk’s X Corp is back in business. The company’s latest X-related product is XChat, a messenger designed for secure communication between X users. The app is now available for pre-order in the iOS App Store, with a release scheduled for April 17th. It’s billed as an end-to-end encrypted chat app with no ads or tracking. It sounds enticing, especially if you frequently message other X users. The problem is, that description isn’t quite right.
As Jack Dawes of Mashable points out , XChat’s privacy policy falls somewhat short of its promises. If you scroll down to the “App Privacy” section of XChat’s App Store page, you’ll see that the app states it may collect the following data and link it to your identity:
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Location
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Contacts
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Search history
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Usage data
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Contact information
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User-generated content
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Identifiers
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Diagnostics
X Corp also claims to collect additional “user content,” but this data isn’t linked to you. However, it’s a long list of information that this so-called “private” chat app collects from you and associates with your identity. Even though XChat is fully end-to-end encrypted, it seems rather disingenuous to claim the app doesn’t track your activity when its privacy policy states it may collect any of this data. I wouldn’t feel particularly secure knowing XChat was collecting my contacts, location, and usage data, even if it didn’t have access to the messages themselves. By comparison, Signal , one of the most popular secure chat apps, only collects its users’ contact information —and doesn’t associate this data with the user.
XChat claims to have a number of key features found in other popular chat apps. These include editing or deleting messages for all chat participants, blocking screenshots, sending disappearing messages, cross-platform calling, and group chats. (The app’s App Store description lists a group chat with 481 participants.)
Since the app is designed for communication between X users, you’ll need an X account to use XChat. This means the app probably won’t be as popular as other messaging apps, but it could attract existing X users who already have a lot of direct messaging contacts. We’ll see if this is the case when the app launches later this week, but I suspect privacy-conscious users will prefer to look for alternatives.