What data were you trusting with freenode? It's almost all public and often logged to a public web server. So you had PMs and your irc password on there. IRC has never been a place for secure communication.
yeah worst case was when freelists was acquired and then all the groups emails where suddenly indexed and made public in their tentative to become a web hub. those had a supposition of privacy, albeit minimal as it was not a specifically secure server, it was definitely not public.