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Elon Musk’s “X Corp” is back. The company’s latest X-themed product is XChat, a messaging app designed for X users to securely chat with each other. app is Currently available for preorder on the iOS App Store<\/a> With a release date of April 17, and advertises itself as an end-to-end encrypted chat app free of ads or tracking. This sounds like a great pitch, especially if you’re someone who frequently messages other X users. The problem is that the pitch doesn’t sound completely accurate. <\/p>\n As Mashable’s Jack Dawes highlights<\/a>XChat’s app privacy policies are not in line with its promises. If you scroll down to the “App Privacy” section of XChat’s App Store page, you’ll see that the app has announced that it may collect the following data points, and tie them to your identity:<\/p>\n Place <\/p>\n<\/li>\n Contact<\/p>\n<\/li>\n search history<\/p>\n<\/li>\n usage data<\/p>\n<\/li>\n contact info<\/p>\n<\/li>\n User Content<\/p>\n<\/li>\n identifier <\/p>\n<\/li>\n diagnosis<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n X Corp also says it may collect additional “user content,” but this data is not linked to you. Regardless, there’s a long list of information this so-called “private” chat app is taking from you, and linking it to your identity. Even though If I knew that XChat was scraping my contacts, location, and usage data, I wouldn’t feel particularly privy, even if it didn’t have access to the messages. Signal, by comparison, is one of the more popular secure chat apps, Collects contact information only from its users<\/a>\u2014and does not link that data to the user itself.<\/p>\n XChat claims that it comes with some key features that other mainstream chat apps do. This includes editing or deleting messages for everyone in the chat, blocking screenshots, sending disappearing messages, cross-platform calling, and large group chats. (The App Store listing shows a group chat with 481 members.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What do you think so far? Since the app is for X users to communicate with each other, you need an X account to use XChat. This means the app probably won’t pop up like other messaging apps, but it could attract existing X users who have multiple contacts they already chat with in DMs. We’ll see if that’s the case when the app launches later this week, but I think any privacy-minded users might prefer to look for alternative arrangements. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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