This might be the most pedantic thread (on my part, too) I was ever part of. :)

The earliest reference to VPN I can find in the RFCs, RFC2547, seems to call the "destination" (the network spanned by the tunnel) the VPN, not the tunnel itself:

    "If all the sites in a VPN are owned by the same enterprise, the VPN
    is a corporate "intranet".  If the various sites in a VPN are owned
    by different enterprises, the VPN is an "extranet".  A site can be in
    more than one VPN; e.g., in an intranet and several extranets.  We
    regard both intranets and extranets as VPNs."

That same RFC has only one mention of encryption at all, in passing, and as being optional (note the "and/or"):

    A security-conscious VPN user might want to ensure that some or all
    of the packets which traverse the backbone are authenticated and/or
    encrypted.

It does not seem to me that privacy was implied.

I still think that VPNs were invented to connect smaller private networks to a larger private network together, where private != privacy. (But rather related to authorities, such as using "private IP addresses" in e.g. 10.0.0.0/8, instead of publicly routable ones.)

Privacy was a (good, likely popular) option, but just not part of the strict definition of what a VPN is (much unlike today).