X Chat has been announced by the Elon Musk-owned social media platform which is basically the upgraded version of DMs which were used to communicate with someone one-to-one on the platform. Here’s everything the new version of chat brings for everyone.
X Chat was announced on the X platform through a dedicated account which mentioned the following features:
- “end-to-end encrypted chats and file sharing
- edit, delete, or make messages disappear
- block screenshots and get notified of attempts
- no ads. no tracking. total privacy.”
X also has a support page where it details the new features available in X Chat. When entering Chat for the first time, a private-public key pair is created specific to each user. Users are prompted to enter a PIN (which never leaves the device), which is used to keep the private key securely stored on X’s infrastructure. This private key can then be recovered from any device if the user knows that PIN. In addition to the private-public key pairs, there is a per-conversation key that is used to encrypt the content of the messages. The private-public key pairs are used to exchange the conversation key securely between participating users.
The messages are protected with “strong cryptographic schemes to encrypt every single message, link, and reaction that are part of an encrypted conversation before they leave the sender’s device and remain encrypted while stored on X’s infrastructure. Once messages are received by the recipient devices, they are decrypted so that they can be read by the user.”
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Your previous messages will still be available in your inbox, but they will not be encrypted. Once the user you are chatting with registers for Chat, the conversation will be upgraded to an encrypted chat and only messages sent going forward will be encrypted.
To use X Chat, both sender and recipient should be on the latest X iOS or Android apps or on Web. Further, X notes that while the contents of an Encrypted Direct Message are always encrypted, including any links, media, or files and even reactions to messages, associated metadata (e.g., recipient, creation time, etc.) is not. “If Posts are shared in an encrypted chat, X will have a record that those Posts were shared.”
Further, if at any time you log out from X, all messages including Encrypted Direct Messages on your current device will be deleted; this will not impact any other devices on which you are logged in. Also, if you cannot remember the passcode to access X Chat, you can reset it from any device which you are already using Chat from. If unable to reset from a logged in device, you will not be able to recover your encrypted conversation history. “We will be improving this limitation in the near future,” X noted.
X Chat: Availability
X Chat is currently rolling out on iOS and the Web, with the Android version coming soon. X will also soon launch a new Voice Memos feature within Chat.