[pm90]

Totally unsurprised by this.

Where I used to work, user activity/transactions data sent to us would be stored on a single giant nfs volume. If you were added to a Linux group you can full, unaudited access to everything. Whenever someone tried to build anything that would restrict and audit access there would be a ton of pushback from engineers and customer support who loved being able to ssh into a machine and have full access to everything.

[_jal]

Not uncommon in early-stage startups. I've learned to build these sorts of things with access control and auditing up-front, but certainly have built my share of attractive nuisances over time.

My advice is stub something out up front, before you go to production. You don't have time to do it right, but you do have time to establish the norm. Even if your audit trail is just a two-minute DB trigger that records that Worker Bob changed Customer Alice's password yesterday at 11, make it clear that there needs to be an articulable reason at hand for having used mechanisms that may violate users' trust.