2. While IRC isn't private, you should be made aware if someone's logging it, and frankly I'm not really in favor of logging it in any case, as it detracts from the more informal nature of it.
Yeah I do agree to a certain extent.
Forum posts are obviously going to be archived, and examined, and remain public.
Chat-rooms seem more of a grey area to me. I can see enormous use to archiving and mining the data, but on the other hand it does look slightly creepy being able to search and find some inane conversation I might have had months ago when I was in a silly mood.
While I do sort of agree, I learned long ago that nearly all channels are logged anyway since years by some channelbots. Often enough including statistics which will tell how many lines you wrote, when you where last online and that you where the guy using the most sad smilies this week.
For instance in ##javascript, half the questions posed end with the answer "Use a closure".
These are public channels anyway, archiving them seems fine to me. I'm surprised google hasn't got in on this yet.