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.