Are my conversations being made public?

In short, no!

Please be assured that a private conversation is exactly that. We use a sophisticated service called tenderapp that ensures customer conversations are dealt with efficiently. It also hooks into our Knowledge Base to suggest support/help articles to the user. Do look out for these article; they appear in blocks like the following in your discussions:

The web interface does give the impression that it's a public discussion, but it's not.

How does it work?

When an email is sent to us, our email support system creates an internal thread for it. When we reply, a link to the private online conversation is sent back to you, the user. When you click on it, the tenderapp service remembers it rather cleverly by using cookies in your Internet browser and you're the only person who can see the conversation: then and when you revisit. We'd never be so irresponsible as to put people's data (the email addresses, the email signatures, etc) online.

How are my conversations used?

We use the conversation to engage personally with each customer who gets in touch, log their issue and keep them abreast of the progress being made on their feedback.

When we do learn from our interactions with customers, we often write an article (in public domain) for the wider audience on our Knowledge Base. Such an article would have no direct reference to the original emails.