Elon Musk’s XChat Claims to Offer ‘Private’ Messaging (but Is Reserving the Right to Collect Your Data)

Elon Musk’s “X Corp” is back. The company’s latest X-themed product is XChat, a messaging app designed to allow X users to securely chat with each other. The app is currently available for pre-order on the iOS App Store with a release date of April 17 and presents itself as an end-to-end encrypted chat app with no ads or tracking. This seems like a great pitch, especially if you’re someone who frequently messages other X users. The problem is that the pitch doesn’t seem entirely accurate.

As Mashable’s Jack Dawes points out, XChat’s app privacy policies are a bit out of step 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 stated that it can collect the following data points and link them to your identity:

• Location

• Contacts

• Search history

• Usage data

• Contact details

• User Content

• Identifiers

• Diagnosis

X Corp also states that it may collect additional “User Content,” but that this data is not linked to you. Either way, it’s a long list of information that the so-called “private” chat app takes from you and links it to your identity. Even though XChat is fully end-to-end encrypted, it seems rather disingenuous to claim that the app has no tracking, when its privacy policy says that it can get all that data back from you. I wouldn’t feel particularly private if I knew that XChat was pulling my contacts, location, and usage data, even if it didn’t have access to the messages themselves. In comparison, Signal, one of the most popular secure chat apps, only collects contact information from its users and does not link this data to the user themselves.

XChat claims that it comes with some key features that other mainstream chat apps offer. 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.)

As the app is intended for X users to communicate with each other, you need an X account to use XChat. This means the app probably won’t work the same way as other messaging apps, but it could attract existing X users who already have a number of contacts they chat with in DMs. We’ll see if that’s the case when the app launches later this week, but I imagine any privacy-conscious user may prefer to look into alternative arrangements.