While it's not common practice to read private messages, site owners have every right to know what is passing through their site. People need to realize that in most cases, forums are privately held and not subject to normal 'rights'. What rights someone has on a forum are those granted by the site owner and are revokable at any time.
The mod provides and easy way for site owners to verify if something illegal or unscrupulous is happening in private messages should that be brought to their attention. Which when used, can enable the site owner to notify the proper authorities of any illegal activity.
As stated earlier, if an owner wanted to read PMs they could easily open the database with phpMyAdmin and read them. The mod only enables owners to skip that step.
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