Pidgin developpers say that the responsibility to assure privacy for public computer users belongs to the OS
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/9571
so I post the bug here.
In my opinion, for individual accounts, chat logging enabled in Pidgin is useful, because users can review their conversations. But for the guest account, it is not. Guests (students at a school library, for example) use Pidgin just for a while. In many cases, they must not log out from the guest account (a regular policy, because it takes some time and make others mind to wait). If chat logging is enabled (guest users don't know anything about it, because there is not any notification / warning) and guests have no right to close the guest session, any guest can view easily private messages of other guests before him.
So I suggest to deactivate by default (even better, disable completely) chat logging for the guest account, or to give an option for the administrator to decide for his/her guests, and to warn guests when their conversation is logging.
I'm using Ubuntu 9.04.
Thank you for helping with making Ubuntu better by reporting this bug. However, since Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Pidgin isn't the default IM client anymore and is therefore not installed by default.
Because it's not the default IM client, it won't be integrated into the system as well as Empathy, which is the default IM client. Adding code to the /usr/share/
I'm marking this bug as Invalid. However, you could always add the necessary code to /usr/share/