@simsa0 Thank you for the excursus. It's interesting to know that in GNU Social terms "Private message" and "Direct message" refer to different tools/features. This returns us to importance of terminology definition...
And I didn't hear about "Private messages" in GNU social (as they are not part of "Twitter compatible" API, which AndStatus uses?!).
Having difficulties to figure out, which dent/message is private (in Pump.io), I recently implemented a function, which tells if attachment _may_ be private :-)

For now, I personally assume that only "Direct messages" are really private.

As to future implementations, in order to avoid confusion, I suggest to add an explicit "Privacy" attribute to any message (defaults to Public - we are in a Social network!). This attribute may have more than two values ("private", "public"), but maybe also something like "one-to-one" and "group", refering to the concrete "one" person and one group and meaning concrete lists of users, having access to the message. This attribute should not allow a system/user to misinterpret the scope of privacy.

@lnxw48 @mcscx @andstatus @roland @erkan