Discourse(the forum software) has a feature for Leaders and Admins/Staff called Impersonate to use our account by simply visiting our profile and clicking something like “Impersonate wevetments” and they would use our account with complete access and we wouldn’t suspect a thing. It made me wonder if the higher ups impersonate our accounts without our permission/consent and look at our private information or whatever information that’s on our account?
This type of behavior would pretty unethical in almost any case I can think of. The cases that would make sense have other tools to address the problems (ex: moving threads, editing titles and posts, marking solutions, etc). No moderator would admit to doing this, but my guess is Roblox’s staff is not going to do this.
I’m actually fairly certain a few years back there was a couple of threads posted about staff logging into players accounts to play their private games & visit the place in studio, I’m guessing to search for malicious code or stolen work.
I think you may have misunderstood the OP, I’m talking about our Forum accounts, not Roblox accounts.
What’s the goal of your question? Common sense should answer this. Of course staff aren’t going to randomly be checking out people’s DMs, they have better things to do.
I was just curious because I caught some strange activity on my account such as the theme going back to the default, so I asked my friend who has knowledge about Discourse, and impersonating is the first thing he said, my curiosity grew so I went researching and found out how powerful the feature was and how some admins made some accidents while impersonating.
Edit:
I never mentioned DMs in my post, I was rather referring to account email and account settings.
I also wouldn’t say “common sense” would answer my question. A person like me who’s concerned about privacy needs an exact answer. I understand your point that the staff have other important stuff to do other than impersonating our accounts.
Why would they change your theme though? Seems like a rookie mistake if you were someone who logged into other people’s accounts.
I’m not entirely sure, but I’m not really saying that “An admin changed my theme”, but rather “An admin could of changed my theme by accident.” It could have been a bug while changing my settings the other day, but just reading about the impersonate feature makes my stomach turn (read the link I posted in the OP). I don’t have anything to hide in my account, but the feeling that someone could be watching my every move is just creepy.
O Well, if the someone unauthorised does go on our account to get private/sensitive information, they would be violating The Data Protection Act 1998 or in the U.K. as well as other countries is The General Data Protecrion Act 2018. The individual and the organisation could find themselves prosecuted which to my belief roblox wouldn’t hire just anyone to become admins or moderations. So I wouldn’t really concern yourself as much but data protection breach does happen.
Privacy policy on main website.
I didn’t say that these few staff members have better things to do than answering data privacy questions; try not to put words in my mouth. I said that they have better things to do than randomly impersonating accounts, i.e. it is not likely that they did.
I typed this part poorly, sorry for the confusion.
But basically what I meant to say was I get your point that they have better things to do other than impersonating our accounts.
So just because your theme got reset you now suspect somebody is on your account?
Nope, the theme change and my question are separate, the question was just some sort of trivia. I just used the theme change as an example because that’s all the strangeness I’ve caught so far.
I still don’t understand why Admins would want to log in to anyone’s account. They normally just send feedback.
I’m not saying that an admin logged on my account, I’m asking if they do such action in general, possibly for assistance or debugging, but I’m pretty sure they have logs in the back end for that. I was just curious is they use the feature I mentioned.
No, for an exact answer the admins are NOT allowed to access your account without proper permission. Unless for moderation.
What does moderation have to do with impersonating?
I’m not involved in running the developer forum so I don’t have an exact answer but I can provide some information.
I can definitively say that most staff do not have access to this feature, certainly not Leaders or regular Roblox Staff members of the forum. The staff that may have access to this feature are staff involved in running the forum who would have a reason to assist users with issues that they are experiencing with the forum.
Roblox Staff would not use this feature without a reason, as @buildthomas said they have better things to do and they are busy with their jobs. Also, there are admin logs showing what actions have been taken by users with elevated permissions so it would be clear that they are abusing their permissions if they were impersonating a lot of users for no reason.
To add onto what @TheGamer101 said. Roblox is a professional company who values our privacy as much as we do. It would also give a bad reputation if they got caught doing such, which is no good for a company like them.
I wasn’t at all considering Roblox unprofessional, I’ve gained so much from Roblox. All I wanted was a clarification or a straight answer simply because I am 100% concerned with privacy.