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IT Pros Can't Resist Peeking At Privileged Info
Orome1 writes "IT security staff will be some of the most informed people at the office Christmas party this year. A full 26 per cent of them admit to using their privileged log in rights to look at confidential information they should not have had access to in the first place. It has proved just too tempting, and maybe just human nature, for them to rifle through redundancy lists, payroll information and other sensitive data including, for example, other people's Christmas bonus details."
I recall reading an article that said that all of Facebook's (then) hundreds of programmers all have full access to the live system data. Especially on top of the announcement that they want to double their employees in the next year or whatever, it sort of makes it hopeless to expect any sort of privacy there if anyone actually gets interested in you.
G.
It's not limited to IT either. A friend of mine, who works in HR, as a Temp, basically gets work handed to her that other people don't have time to do. This includes expenses, and occasionally allows her to view peoples salaries, and, scarily, who's getting made redundant. She's a Temp, paid about £16k/y (having been made redundant a few years ago having been making ~22k, she took anything she could get) and has access to her superiors and co-workers salaries, expenses and even their original interview records.
Some would say that's just rubbing her nose in it.
But the reality is that some companies just circumvent internal rules in order to get things done.
and all this she freely shares with me as idle chatter.
Right. You should come home to your wife and tell her "I quit my job because my boss wanted me to do something unethical. I know you're pregnant and we just bought a house, but you know, ethics is everything. Now pack your bags, there's a nice bridge down the highway under which there is a patch of grass that'll be nice for us."
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The switchboard was listening in to calls 100 years ago. The mail room was looking at letters 150 years ago. Heck, I'm sure the equivalent was going on in ancient Sumer (sneaking a peak in those sealed clay tablets). "The help" is always going to eavesdrop. Not all of them, not all the time, but it happens.
Agreed, and would like to add spam filtering to the pile. Training the filters effectively (to weed out false positives, catch the sneakier spam, etc) means seeing practically everyone's inbound emails until the initial tuning is done, and once in a great while after that for maintenance and upkeep. You just maintain the confidentiality required to know that yeah it's ugly and it's in there, but it's nobody's business. I only interacted with these mails enough to make my job more effective, and after that it all got forgotten and ignored.
Doing this helped me better tune the filters to block the political crap (DU, Limbaugh, etc) while at the same time allowing exceptions for a couple of execs in the company who actually did lobby in Washington DC, the state capital, etc. It allowed me to block the dating site and sex site emails (you'd be amazed unless you're an email admin, in which case you'd probably know already) while at the same time allowing the usual spousal romantic emails.
I didn't give a damn about the messages - I was in there to analyze content in order to catch spammers. The result was a happier group of employees who rarely if ever saw any spam, but at the same time could do most things within reason and company policy (it was fairly loose) and not lose any email.
I considered the whole thing subject to the same confidentiality restrictions as a doctor - yeah, you see the naughty bits in the full glory, but so what? You've got a job to do, so there's no real time or cause for you to be titillated, angry, outraged, or whatever. If you are, there'd better be a cause to inform the corp legal department and then the cops, because otherwise you're obviously not doing your job.
All said and done, at least in this aspect the AUP covers it perfectly - expect the contents of any email or data on the company wires to be seen by anyone. Of course that doesn't mean you get to go snooping around - violating trust is a great way to obliterate a career. OTOH, don't expect it to remain a perfect secret, either, because not all of us are going to be as professional about it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
And right there is the fundamental flaw. Most people don't make rational decisions, even if they have all the necessary information (which they almost never do). It is for that reason that "free markets" as espoused by most proponents of free markets are unrealistic. Free markets are an ideal that should guide your regulation of the markets, but the markets can never really be free.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false