Elon Musk continues to announce new features for his social network X, formerly Twitter. Now it is the turn of audio and video calls that will be coming soon to the platform. The information was released by Musk himself through his X profile, where he also listed the features that will have the new functions to be incorporated.
These new features had already been anticipated, albeit enigmatically, by the designer of Twitter/X in July on his social network profile. More specifically, Andrew Conway shared some screenshots of what the new feature would look like. At the time, he did not provide further information on the new features.
What is known about the new calling and video features of Elon Musk’s social network?
According to what Elon Musk reported in his publication, audio and video calls will soon come to X, without specifying a specific date. He added that they are going to work on Android, iOS and also on PC and Mac. Interestingly, it will not require a phone number to access these calls. Elon Musk also stated that X is the globally effective address book and that this will make audio and video calls unique.
From the screenshot posted by Conway, it can be seen that the calls will be available on the DM screen, more precisely on the upper left side. What has not yet been specified is whether this will be a feature that can be accessed by everyone or whether it will be exclusive to users with Twitter Blue.
Arguably, the ability to make voice and video calls through X is one more step towards Musk’s idea of making this platform a whole, even with payment and digital banking services.
Another X controversy: the private data collected will include academic and employment information.
Following X’s news, the social network updated its privacy policy. It will become effective as of September 29 and the most important aspect is the type of user information it will collect. According to the new policy, biometric data will be collected for security and identification purposes. Primarily, this would be to combat identity theft.
It is clarified that such biometric data will be of premium users for the time being. Such users can verify their identity with a government ID and a selfie to provide an additional layer of verification.
The other issue to keep in mind is that the new policy also enables the collection of employment and academic data. The objective is to create its own job board in X to disseminate job offers and recommend potential employees.
X specifies that user information can be used to help train artificial intelligence models. It is now something that all technology companies such as Zoom and even Google are starting to do. The worrying thing about the data that Elon Musk’s social network may collect is that no clear information is provided about the purposes and objectives of collecting such data.
X users will have to give their consent for this, so be careful to avoid providing unwanted information.
