Well, they were before we decided every scrap of data needs to be vacuumed up to the cloud for marketing reasons, in that no one in the 90s was wasting committing computing resources to scan them and the necessary storage/databasing to store them long term aside from an inbox. I can say with a good degree of likelihood that my IRC chats and maybe AIM/MSN convos are probably gone, and that’s good thing.
Being private and nobody wanting to actually read them are two different things. Owners and operators of irc serves, bbs, etc have historically always been able to read the data flowing through them. Especially in the early internet and arpanet days where encryption didn’t even exist nor would it have been feasible given the computing power required at the time. My only point is that “private messages” have never been private if they’re through any service on the internet that is not verifiably encrypted end to end.
Well, they were before we decided every scrap of data needs to be vacuumed up to the cloud for
marketingreasons, in that no one in the 90s was wasting committing computing resources to scan them and the necessary storage/databasing to store them long term aside from an inbox. I can say with a good degree of likelihood that my IRC chats and maybe AIM/MSN convos are probably gone, and that’s good thing.Being private and nobody wanting to actually read them are two different things. Owners and operators of irc serves, bbs, etc have historically always been able to read the data flowing through them. Especially in the early internet and arpanet days where encryption didn’t even exist nor would it have been feasible given the computing power required at the time. My only point is that “private messages” have never been private if they’re through any service on the internet that is not verifiably encrypted end to end.