Greetings. Based on preliminary information I heard from the Facebook launch announcement today for their new "chat/email" system (Facebook keeps insisting that it isn't really email), users will not have the ability to declare chats or related conversations to be "off the record" -- everything will apparently be recorded. Individual users will have the ability to archive or delete their own copies of transcripts, but it appears that there is explicitly not a functionality similar to Google's "off the record" chat feature, which permits users to declare that their conversations with given individuals should not be routinely preserved. "It just didn't make sense for us," were pretty much the words that Zuckerberg used in response to a question on this topic.

We'll have to wait for more info, but this could be a major privacy problem in the making.

--Lauren--