Eh? WTF?

[charmian]

http://news.livejournal.com/125326.html?thread=83019150#t83019150

It's not clear exactly what happened here, but why would a staffer choose to make a random comment on an entry using their staff account? How did they even find their journal? As far as I can tell what happened is that the staff person does admit to leaving a comment on an entry which was in 'bad taste' and then deleting it, but then it's unclear whether the entry was locked (as the person alleges) or not (as the staff member alleges).

More disturbing are the allegations made by this person, although they admit to 'trolling' in the past, so they might not be a reliable source. However... do volunteers really have the ability to see locked posts? Or is it only closed support requests?

Comments

Re: Horrifying because...(unable to edit my reply for what I forgot so here's the rest, Janine)

[janinedog]

If the closed requests were all public in nature, then yeah, whatevs. If they weren't, isn't that wrong of him, in this particular case, to even look at those?

If the requests were indeed private, and he told you information from them, then yes, this would be an abuse of privs. If they were public, though (even if they were closed), it wouldn't be an abuse of privs, because public (open or closed) requests can be viewed by anyone--even regular, non-volunteer users.

I think the issue here is that you seem to be very upset over something that may have been nothing. You said yourself you don't know if he was looking at private or public requests. Maybe it's just me, but I tend to err on the side of trusting people, especially people who are high enough in the support hierarchy to have special privileges (I know the majority of those people quite well). If you want to know for sure, though, maybe you should ask him.

Re: Horrifying because...(unable to edit my reply for what I forgot so here's the rest, Janine)

[azurelunatic]

There is also "private in nature" vs. a request in a private category -- a user could make a public request about a topic they felt was personal and might have say sent to support@ if they'd given it extensive thought, vs. something that would get automatically moved to a private cat because Support is trained that this is private (like password in req, billing info).

Re: Horrifying because...(unable to edit my reply for what I forgot so here's the rest, Jani

[janinedog]

True, but if they made the information public, I don't see anything wrong with looking it up/reading it.

Re: Horrifying because...(unable to edit my reply for what I forgot so here's the rest, Jani

[azurelunatic]

This exactly, which is why the distinction between information in a private cat and information in public that the user considers sensitive is important. Granted, it would be nice if, say, users could put their own closed requests into a more-protected state if it turned out that those reqs being public was causing them issues -- like I1+ and more searchbots-behaving-badly-proof -- but on the other hand, support has to be able to do their job, and part of that is seeing what has come before. (In the department of DW Is Not Facebook.)

Re: Horrifying because...(unable to edit my reply for what I forgot so here's the rest, Janine)

[marahmarie]

So he can snoop to satisfy his own curiosity (which is exactly what he did) and that's OK as long as he doesn't discuss with me exactly what he saw? So if I don't like, say user_X on LJ (she's hypothetical, but even for a hypothetical, she's just a miserable woman who has made my life a wreck) I could become a volunteer, work myself up to nice, high privs, then go through user-X's past, present and future support requests (including the private ones, if applicable) on the mere premise that I was checking how a public support request of hers had turned out, to glean any and all possible dirt on her (and lo and behold, her boyfriend stalks her, one former LJ friend harassed her and got suspended, her account was hacked, her credit card was closed, the check she wrote to LJ bounced!) and as long as I didn't tell any other LJ user (but I can tell other LJ volunteers, yes or no?) about what I learned, seriously, that would be alright? Because if that's how it works, I'm going to go join LJ Support to become a volunteer right now (this I have got to see - so the hell with the fact that it's wrong -or at least, it *should be* wrong- it certainly sounds all wrong to me).

Re: Horrifying because...(unable to edit my reply for what I forgot so here's the rest, Janine)

[zarhooie]

her boyfriend stalks her = Abuse, private cat, you're unlikely to EVER be able to see it
one former LJ friend harassed her and got suspended = Abuse, private cat, you're unlikely to EVER be able to see it
her account was hacked = possibly g/unk, though likely to be abuse, and therefore a private cat, and third verse, same as the first...
her credit card was closed = billing, staff cat, you will never see this.
the check she wrote to LJ bounced = billing, staff cat, you will never see this.

Basically, all these hypotheticals are things that are in private categories which only staff or vetted, NDA'd vols can see.

And, for the record? That is way more work than you seem to think it is.

Re: Horrifying because...(unable to edit my reply for what I forgot so here's the rest, Janine)

[charmian]

You see, I think people are getting confused because you are changing your story. At the beginning, you presented this volunteer as looking at the support history because the user was not satisfied with something (that is, in the course of their duties). Now you're claiming that there was no reason for him to be doing so other than his own curiosity, is that correct? And so, his looking up the support history was entirely unrelated to the user's support requests, you are also claiming?

If the volunteer did have access to any truly sensitive information, and was misusing it, I can see how this would be a problem. However, if they did, they would have signed an NDA.

Also, once again, we're back to the problem that you don't have any evidence that the volunteer had access to any of these privileged categories. If they didn't, all they would be looking at is publicly accessible information. I think the reason people are saying you're overreacting is because a) you first presented this as part of the volunteer's official duties, and b) it's unclear whether the volunteer truly had access to any private categories.