The article points out one of the "Well, duh" things that I noticed when people got paranoid about AIM privacy -- namely, there's so very much going through that it would be horrendously wasteful of disk space and processing power to even think about monitoring or logging even a fraction of it. "Hundreds of gigabytes a day", evidently. I can see that -- I have extensive chats with friends, and we can get 20k text exchanged in 20 minutes no problem. I type faster than some people can even read.
Yes, it would be pretty simple to do keyword searches on IMs and see if there's anything worth listening to, from a security standpoint. And yes, that could be kind of creepy. But also keep in mind that if your e-mail provider is spam-filtering your e-mail, they're shuffling through your e-mail in a very similar way, which is also kind of creepy. It's for, after all, your own protection.
I have a somewhat relaxed view about those little personal details that I'd absolutely die if anyone else other than people I trusted found out about. I do not honestly give a flying fuck at the moon if some security geek over at AOL knows that ICQ User #55527386 has such-and-such sexual kinks and has had unprotected cybersex with
But then, I was raised with little expectation of privacy, in the thick of the information age. Not everyone else was.
*shrug*