In the more recent draft of the protocol, the functionality provided by 'privacy' is always on; iq requests are defined as IQ requests against the representation of the user within the room, not the account/client connected.
Wait! Does this mean that it will always be impossible to determine the actual JID of a chat participant, and all chats will be anonymous? Will it also become impossible to browse the room and see the real JIDs of the participants? (The draft does not mention this.)
If not, ignore the rest of this message :) and maybe you can explain in more detail what you meant above.
If so, then I strongly, strongly disapprove of this. Privacy can be useful if people really want to chat anonymously, but for the most part it's nice to know who it is you're chatting with, especially in a small chat among friends/coworkers. In particular, this 'feature' would really turn off any company thinking about deploying Jabber internally.
And no, setting your nick to your real name or telling people who you are in a message isn't good enough; it's best if the client itself knows, so it can show the correct buddy icon and otherwise make it clear that the chat participant is the same as the person in your buddy list. (Yes, my client does this.)
�Jens
