> You may find that your user account has permission to read the employee salary database. However, you may not be authorized to read that database by corporate policy because you are not a manager.

It's true that there are technical enforcement mechanisms, and corporate policies, but it is false that the former must be called permissions, and the latter must be called authorizations. The policies can easily be called either authorization or permission. It is true that we refer to e.g. Unix file permissions, and a corporate policy is more likely to use "authorization" but this is not a semantic difference--the corporate policy would be correct and binding if it used the word permission.

If a fellow employee asks you "do I have permission to do this?" you must say "no" (or alternately "you're not permitted, even though the computer will not enforce that"). Saying "yes" because there is a technical permission would be a very bad idea.