Why does that matter unless you have something to hide?
Not wishing to play Devil's Advocate here, but - that is one of the oldest and most specious anti-privacy arguments in existence and is regularly brought out by governments whenever they feel obliged to defend some new piece of legislation enabling them to access data previously inaccessible to them. Of course it matters - users are entitled to know what "private" actually means in this context.
17-12-201403:52 PM - last edited on 18-12-201411:20 AM by Retired-Laura
I agree it is deeply important (especially in view of the Nigella revelations) to know if anyone at Vodafone - in any of its offices under whatever local/global privacy legislation prevails - can look at anything called "private" in here.
A "what have you got to hide" response is insidious and dare I say it, only to be expected from those who got a lot to hide themselves.
As has already been said any form of electronic communication can be intercepted and viewed by 3rd parties. GCHQ, the CIA, NSA have all been doing it for years. You messages posted both publicly and privately on a forum such as this would not be exempt from their snooping.
Specificly relating to Vodafone employees, I don't know if the feature is available for them to easily read PM's though I imagine an encypted copy would be held in a database somewhere. The forum software isn't actually hosted by Vodafone though so I would doubt the admins would have access at the database level to check this sort of stuff.
Core answer will be that someone somewhere CAN read them, although whether they would bother or not (without some kind of cause such as an ongoing investigation or whatnot) is anyone's guess.
As the saying goes, nothing's private on the internet.
To turn the issue on its head: When I was travelling in PR China earlier in the year, I found that there were whole swathes of the internet I couldn't access, including all my webmail, though webmail was available for half a day in Beijing at the start of the trip. The only means of communication that they had missed was PMs via the Vodafone forum, so my window of communication was very narrow, but not entirely closed. I've since heard of others having a similar experience, and finding that Linkedin was their only route to family and friends. Apparently a laptop with VPN got around some of the problems, but I was travelling light.
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