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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

>every time I access production systems, I have a ton of messages telling me that our access is being completely tracked and we are prohibited from doing anything that was mentioned in the article.

That's nice, but it shouldn't be forbidden to violate users' privacy, it should be impossible.

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I mean... it should be, but every business I've ever worked at has had difficulty cleaving between "the kind of access that developers need in order to do their jobs" and "the kind of access that would be abusable." It's legitimately difficult to do, and there's no way to make your system proof against insider abuse without serious trade-offs.

The purported "God-mode" that Uber had years ago, and showed off at parties, was a real problem with their culture. The ability of devs to get read access to some production data is much less of a huge deal.

> It's legitimately difficult to do, and there's no way to make your system proof against insider abuse without serious trade-offs.

I know homomorphic encryption is very new, but deploying it for privacy applications like these is a Good Idea.

While I admit that I have literally zero experience with homomorphic encryption, I suspect that even after whatever deployment costs there would be, the burden on your ability to do things like investigate bugs, much less repair data if needed, would be non-trivial.

>That's nice, but it shouldn't be forbidden to violate users' privacy, it should be impossible.

Work for just about any company, tech or otherwise, in a sysadmin role. There is always going to be some way for a smart, malicious admin to get into things.

Snowden is maybe the best example. If an organization with an insider threat risk profile as high as the NSA's can't get it right, then you can be pretty certain almost no one else is either.

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