This cements my opinion that we need sysadmin licenses.
As a sysadmin myself, when I read that in the article, I physically cringed. No wonder you can't trust anyone with your private data these days!!
That said, the insights I've gained over the last couple of years have made me very wary about anything stored in databases concerning myself and the rest of the general public.
Let's just say that Snowden only exposed the tip of the proverbial iceberg and that one day the truth will likely come out because of some horribly insecure entities being hacked (if it hasn't already happened) with massive exposure of people in positions of power as a result.
The more you look behind the curtain the longer you are amazed that it is still being held up.
We kept telling them that this was a bad idea, that it wasn't compliant, that it was dangerous, that they could lose their ability to process credit cards at all at best, and lose their entire database of customer credit card numbers at worst.
But there was no money in the budget for this kind of refactoring.
Until the data was exfiltrated via a trojan.
Suddenly, there was money in the budget.
But the horse had already bolted.
Was this before or after the lawsuit? Assuming there was one (which there really needs to be...)