Let's take that bank argument, I'm definitely not advocating for not locking vaults or safe deposit boxes. But somebody has access to those, and when they need access they have a process for getting to it. Frankly, it definitely can be abused and banks wouldn't know for the better until after the abuse when the employee would be terminated and taken to court.
That's because they have audit logs in place. And the reason why its part of your contract as an engineer not to abuse your access to customer data.
I think the larger point I'm trying to make here is that its really, really hard to build a system that prevents any type of abuse of data. Now I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive for systems that make it hard to abuse customers data, but bad actors have ways of beating these systems and I have some empathy for a policy that places trust in employees (who need access, by definition of their job!) to not abuse it.
Anyways, these are all good comments made in response to mine. I agree with them!
[EDIT] Okay - I see the incoming point about them not needing access to that data for their job, that's a fair point. But I think most of us have been at a point in our careers where knowing the piece of information about a user that might have gotten them into a certain state is occasionally a valuable debugging tool.
