A word of warning

[trekmaster]

Just wanted to share some info about I recently learned and think should be shared with everyone on poker forums like this and others we are all members admin and owners of forums in most cases have access to and the ability to go thru and read any so called PRIVATE MESSAGES that you send to other members of their forum.I think that this is an invasion of privacy and this should be stated in the messaging area before people sent what they think is a PRIVATE so now you know never to share anything in these PM's that you wouldnt share with the world.

[NFI]

There are plugins (modifications) available for SMF, VBulletin, phpbb3 and many more forum software versions that allow administrators to read private messages. When these were not around it was widely known that Admins could check the database for messages. According to the people that made the modifications it was made available (if wanted) to check up on claims of abuse, other admins who frequented the forum and spam being sent to members.

It is up to the individual to trust or not trust the admin at the forum they post and/or send messages through. Other options are via email, messenger and facebook to keep private messages off the forums. We do not have this modification added at PBT.

[Assistanc3]

Just for clarification, trekmaster is 1000% correct and forum administrators don't need any modifications to see private messages. I am not going to explain how it can be done but it is as simple as point and click for administrators to do so.

My warning to all would be if you don't want someone on the internet to see it then don't post it on the internet. There is no expectation of privacy any more. Even some forums go out of their way to create reasons to publicly post private messages.

Look at the recent changes Facebook has done with their privacy policy or that Google will now be using users comments in ads. Lets also not forget what the United States government does in agreement with those social media sites.

Google's ex-Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt Quotes
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place,"

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

"If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence," Schmidt said, "we can predict where you are going to go," he said memorably.

"Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the Internet?"

"There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society,"

“You can trust us with your data”