After buying Twitter and rebaptizing it X, Elon Musk has teased a whole suite of features as part of his bid to turn the platform into an “everything app,” including banking, job searching, and telecommunications.
X rolled out a job listing platform on the website last August, and voice calling has been available on iOS since last October. Now, since last Wednesday, voice calling is available to all users on the iOS or Android apps.
“audio and video calling are now available to everyone on X!” posted the @XNews account. “who are you calling first?”
“cool fucking website elon now u can doxx urself by default,” reacted @gatolletaz to the news, pointing out a much-commented-upon security vulnerability. “anyway settings>privacy and safety>direct messages>disable calls if u dont want the world to see ur ip.”
On the X Android app, voice and video calling are enabled by default, as well as calls from “People in your address book” and “People you follow.”
A setting called “Enhanced call privacy,” which isn’t on by default, says to enable it “to avoid revealing your IP address to your contact during the call.”
“If both parties to a call have this setting disabled (which it is by default), once our servers facilitate the initial setup, the call itself is routed peer-to-peer such that each party’s IP address may be visible to each other,” reads a page on X with more information about the feature. If either caller has the setting on though, the call goes through X’s infrastructure and both sides have their IP address hidden.
“Hi everyone, NEW TWITTER sucks as we know,” posted @xnotobeard. “if you DO NOT WANT anyone being able to voice call you and see your IP address when they do, DISABLE THE FUNCTION NOW in your Direct message settings, as it’s on by default.”
If somebody does have access to your IP address, there are a few things they can glean from it, including your general geographical location, and even possibly your neighborhood through command line or other easily accessible web-based tools.
While plenty of people complained about the default feature which could expose their IP address to a caller, others just shared general gripes about X rolling out the feature in the first place.
“paranoid that the reason twitter is pushing for calls and voice messages is to harvest voice data for their stupid AI thing,” posted @C0WGF.
And some ask what the point was of adding ever more features anyway.
“twitter trying to tack on more features like audio/voice calls when no one even likes being on here for its primary functions,” complained @Catie_V.