(January 9, 2014 at 6:06 pm)Rayaan Wrote:(January 9, 2014 at 3:05 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: Using information that requires escalated privilege should be done only with a) adequate justification, and b) sufficient oversight. Furthermore, I cannot think of many situations where it would be necessary to do so.
Those are all good points.
However, I cannot think of any ways to establish a sufficient oversight, or some way to prove that the admins won't ever do such an investigation in secret unless they expose their investigation as I did. This is also what Aractus said in his first sentence in post # 12. Similarly, you know that admins are also able to view PMs ("Private Messages") and there is no oversight on whether they will go even further by using some of the PM details they looked at for searching up something. I think that a lot of members feel uncomfortable when they learn the fact that admins have access to their PMs in the first place, let alone the possibility of doing an investigation by using those.
Yeah, it's probably very unlikely to happen, but it's just that I don't see any way to know for sure whether this will be ever done or not (i.e. using private information for doing an investigation) unless an admin willingly admits doing it.
Maybe this simply comes down to how much trust you have in the admins?
You're correct - there is no real way to prove that such illicit investigations are not being done secretly. What can be done is to set expectations and responsibilities via policy and once that is done, if wrongdoing is detected, to deal with the wrongdoing in as transparent a manner as is possible.
It ultimately does come down to trust.
