Privacy and private message

[bendiesel]

Dear Staff,

If one say to users of a VB-website: no one can read your private messages except senders and receivers, how much credibility in this ? administrators, VB developers, Hackers, others... can they read private messages of users of a VB-website ?

[Mark.B]

vBulletin is database driven software so anyone with direct access to the database can read them. No vBulletin staff could read them as we do not have access to your database on a self-hosted site, but you could, your hosting company could, etc. They probably wouldn't bother, but that isn't the question.

The word 'private' in this instance simply means they are not visible to other forum users. It's not a guarantee of privacy and if your users want that they should use encrypted email, not a messaging system on a third party website. You should ideally make that clear in your terms.

[Wayne Luke]

You can encrypt your MySQL Files on the server for a little extra privacy. However, this is known as "At Rest" Encryption. Anyone with legitimate access to the database will be able to read its contents. This includes the user that vBulletin uses. Backups would not be encrypted. You would want to store these on an external server and not your web server.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7...ncryption.html

[bendiesel]

Dear Luke and Mark thank you very much for clarification