@aral still, both email and ap's "privacy guarantee" is the same: your messages will be private to the servers that receive them. that doesn't preclude the "rogue admin" threat model, but it doesn't make either "public" per se.
even if your measuring stick for privacy is e2ee, you're basically making the mistake of equivocating existing implementations with the spec itself. pgp exists for email, but hasn't been done yet for ap. it's like saying xmpp is public despite omemo