7.6. Privacy, Security, and All That Jazz

Groupchat rooms are somewhat public spaces. When people join such rooms, they might think that they are completely anonymous and can say anything they please (perhaps this is why chat rooms have such a bad reputation). However, XMPP groupchat has built-in support for features that can make rooms less than completely anonymous, including:

• The room administrators can always see the real JabberIDs of users in the room; this enables them to deploy appropriate “crowd control” measures, as described earlier in this chapter. However, the room can also be configured so that all participants can view real JIDs by setting the whois configuration option to a value of “anyone” (this kind of transparency is important in certain deployment scenarios).

• If the room configuration sets the enablelogging option to true, the service will automatically archive all of the one-to-many conversations in the room. On public MUC services, users who are sensitive about privacy concerns may find this to be a breach of privacy, whereas within enterprise deployments, the lack of archiving might be considered a problem (e.g., archives might be used for incident reporting or regulatory compliance).

• Unless the room configuration sets the publicroom option to false, the service will enable entities to find the room using XMPP Service Discovery, as described in Chapter 5.

• Most MUC services will allow participants to send private, one-to-one messages to other participants in the room.