X (formerly known as Twitter) made another play to become a so-called “everything app” this week as it updated its privacy policy.
The policy, which goes into effect on September 29, gives X permission to gather detailed information about users’ employment history, educational background, job search activity, skills, and even biometric data. Elon Musk, the South Africa-born billionaire, finalized his acquisition of the company only on October 27 of last year. Musk rebranded the social media platform to X this past July.
X Privacy Policy Gets a Significant Update
X states it will use this data to recommend potential jobs to users and share their profiles with prospective employers. Another step forward on the path to X becoming the “everything app” that Musk dreams of.
In addition, X says it may utilize the wide range of information it collects, including from public sources, to train machine learning and AI models. While other major tech companies like Google also use personal data for AI development, privacy advocates argue users should have more control over how their information gets applied for these purposes.
Worryingly, the updated policy also reveals that X intends to gather metadata related to its end-to-end encrypted direct messages. Message metadata consists of information about a communication, such as the sender, recipient, timestamp, and location. Some collection of technical data is often unavoidable for secure messaging services to function properly.
However, users would benefit from X elaborating on the specific types of message metadata it retains and what it will be used for.
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In many ways, Musk’s X seeks far broader usage rights to user data than Twitter did in the past. Collecting more personal details allows X to power new initiatives like job matching and AI development, moving it beyond just a social media platform into an all-in-one service for communicating, searching, finance, and more.
X Users May Soon Be Able to Send Crypto
Earlier this week, on August 28, Rhode Island approved X’s application for a currency transmitter license. This license is mandatory for firms handling user-related financial activities like money transfers, including crypto assets.
However, in early August, Musk point-blank denied that his social media company would be launching its own token. The comments came after a TwitterDAO pump-and-dump scheme, where Musk quickly dismissed the existence of any links to the project. X had no plans to launch a cryptocurrency, “and we never will,” Musk said in an X post.
Musk’s dream of an everything app is heavily influenced by WeChat, a popular Chinese social media platform. The app, which is sparsely used outside of China, is the fifth-most popular social app in the world. Its functionality includes personal messaging, group chats, payments, and games.
An extensive range of features that Musk appears keen to emulate.
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