Public functions in a QThread class: safe?

[high_flyer]

Q: Is it necessary to protect privateMember with mutexes in the above case [as in a lock()/unlock() pair in run() and a QMutexLocker in getPrivateMember()] ?

There is a simple rule to it:
If the variable can be accessed by at least two threads at the same time, it has to be guarded by a mutex, or semaphore or similar mutual exclusion mechanism.
This has nothing to do with variable access privileges (public/protected/private).

[helloworld]

On second thought, a wait condition is perhaps not what you need in this case. But busy looping is still a bad idea, and you can still use above mentioned approach taking advantage of Qts signal/slots mechanism instead.