[plubius]

Originally Posted by tmhall

Okay I just read the 17 page thread in the 2.2 section and the 7 page thread in this section. I'm disappointed by what I saw, but not at all surprised. It is sadly typical in such situations that only a small handful of people will take a stand against undermining civil liberties such as protection of personal privacy while many others will eagerly trample others rights in favor of maximizing their personal power and control.

Ethical arguments aside, there was no reasonable challenge to Bira's legal points, either. And no, I don't consider your "phpMyAdmin does the same thing" argument effective. As Bira pointed out, you install this hack to read PM's, period. The odds are slim that you install phpMyAdmin for that sole purpose. I strongly encourage anyone who reads this to heed Bira's advice and forewarn their users that their PM's are not private if this hack is installed.

And lastly, the only somewhat reasonable arguments I read in either of those threads (i.e. prevention of spam, porn, warez, and threats) can now be easily handled by simply requesting that your users forward any such PM's to the administration, given the fact that "forward" is now a built in feature that wasn't available when these points were first made.

So with all this in mind, do you have any other justification for enabling easy access to your user's PM's?

Blah blah blah!!! What complete and utter crap.

I am sorry I did not see this when it was posted, but I was probably too busy snooping on my members. :ermm:

I normally do not directly criticise a poster, preferring instead to just attack the stupid points one by one without any direct quotes, but this post ticked me off.

People who talk about privacy and freedom of speech rights for an internet site are begging the question.

You have no such rights at an website. The owner of the website provides a service not a country. If the service you provide is geared toward youth and you have pervs and freaks who come to your site, register, never post but send out a few PMs to the kids, you have an obligation to read those PMs to see whether you should contact the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. You do not have any obligation to inform your members that you access their PMs just like you are have no obligation to tell that you can edit their posts, see thier ips or ban them if you need to. If they cannot assume you have these "powers" then they probably are a bit daft or need to learn to learn pretty damn quick. Whenever, I hear about some child being lured away from home and killed, or whenever, I read a PM that was sent to a child asking them what the colour of the under clothes are, I want to grab these self righteous over libel morons and make them dig the grave and console these slain children's families.

You do not run a youth based website? Well, bear in mind that the website is yours. Not TMHall's. Not the ACLU's. It is yours and you have every right to implement any tool you feel is necessary to rid it of the vermin who have no life and no right come to your site to cause trouble.

This is not to say that you can read every PM your site generates. If you demand money from members who want unread PM status, then of course you have to honour that or you could risk assuming breech of contract liability. Another instance is more ethical and indeed the only ethical violation I can see and that is reading the PMs of established members. Those should indeed remain personal. Only you can decide what makes a member "established" or not.