By default they are actually called Personal Messages rather than Private Messages (because admins can see them).
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This seems like an important concern if it isn’t made clear in the TOS that messages can be read by administrators/moderators, which isn’t the default for old systems like the post office which isn’t supposed to read people’s letters and they aren’t able to anyway unless they break a letter seal.
There is an alert banner option for the A.I. message system that alerts users that those messages can be monitored by moderators, may be a good feature for that to be an option for regular personal message topics also.
Haven’t tried that but would guess there would be some complaints. Way to respond to that could be to recommend alternative means of communication outside of discourse.
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The community I manage is still on Facebook, and gaining some control over private messaging is one of the things I really look forward to with Discourse. We have a house rule that people are not to give or take advice in private messages (it’s a support group for managing diabetic cats). Most people are respectful of the rule, but we regularly run into two problematic scenarios:
- a “bad actor” who uses private messaging to users to give advice that goes against our best practices guidelines (or simply, what we allow - circumventing group rules)
- an overenthusiastic helper who gets sucked in a “personal coaching” dynamic through private messages
I’m definitely considering limiting who can contact who through private messages and chat. (Maybe only admins can be messaged.)
We might have group chats, and that would be ok given they can be moderated, but we also want to limit individual chats outside of those, like with private messages.
For me it’s not a question of legal ramifications but of helping us enforce some of the community rules. OTOH I’m aware that being able to communicate privately is how friendships develop, so it might not be ideal to close it down completely. Maybe keep messages, but disallow chat?
I’m also curious about how much access the admin team has to private messages or chats – is it all there in the clear to be read?! Or do we see stats, e.g. who is messaging who and how much?
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For Discourse, they’re referred to as ‘Personal Messages’ as admins do have full access to them so can’t really be deemed ‘private’ (and Moderators can also view them if one of the messages has been flagged).
However, chat DMs are not as easy for admins to view through the UI like with PMs. Though you can create data explorer queries and view the underlying data that way.
On the plus side, there’s a lot of mod tools that work in PMs and chat, which is brilliant. Watched Words, for instance, will work just as well for topics, PMs, and chat. 
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Private messages are called personal messages in Discourse.
As an admin, you can visit any user’s profile and check their messages tab, just like you can look at your own messages. You can see the titles, and you can also open them and read them. (A little tip from someone on the other side: likes on PMs that the admin doesn’t actually have access to feel very weird.)
Admins and moderators can also see the number of personal messages on the users’ admin page, and you can get any data with the help of the data explorer.
The Discourse settings configure who is allowed to initiate messages. Other users can then respond even if they don’t have the permission to create one. So, if you don’t want any 1:1 topics, you probably want to limit that to staff. For exchange within groups, you can configure the group inbox within the group settings. Messages to groups are not limited by the Personal message enabled groups setting.
I think chat DMs work similarly, but I haven’t tested that in detail. Based on what I remember, you cannot send a DM to users who are not allowed to use chat, but you can send them to users who are allowed to use chat but not DMs.
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Something that you could possibly do is to bump the personal message enabled groups setting to TL2 and above.
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Right, I think this will be a big problem with a population coming from Facebook and who have the expectation of « total privacy » 
in « personal messages » (even though « chat » is closer to Facebook DMs).
I’m going to have to think more about this.
Oh, I need to know more about this. Group inbox? Messages to groups? Does that mean one can make a group function somewhat like an email discussion list?
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Yes, you can!
What is more, you can easily
- pull in people who aren’t even registered on your site via email
- have multiple groups and individuals participate
- control the default notification levels (per group)
The chief downside is that message content is somewhat silo’d from forum content in the search. If you lean heavily on group inboxes, this causes quite a few problems.
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I wonder if it’s translated « personnel » in French, because that would imply an expectation of privacy (if something is « personnel » it is definitely not something for any other eyes than yours!)
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Admins don’t need to advertise that they can access private messages. Their elevated access is implicit and part of the job, not a feature to promote. Highlighting it invites pointless debates about a non-issue.
Also, users don’t realize that their emails, SMS, social media messages, and more can be read by people with technical and/or legal authority.
So I wouldn’t bother with this subject.
If you want to read more about this, tho, here are two links: this one and this one.
“Message direct” 
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True. Just makes me a little uneasy, as I – as “The Admin” am also part of the community, which contains many people who are friends. I don’t know, I feel this setup could set the stage for drama down the line.
ouf!!