> "We used a rep that literally done all the work for us" This is why the privacy and security guarantees of almost all companies, credit bureaus, banks, the IRS, the department of motor vehicles, etc., are worthless. Every customer service rep that works at any of those places -- all 500 or 5000 or 50,000 of them -- can pull up info on anyone at any time. The only thing that prevents that is rules. There are no tech…
Yes - no names for obvious reasons but where I work (trust me you've heard of them/probably use them and they are a huge tech company) it is very hard to get access to anything even slightly customer related. You need to go through multiple levels of review and approval (often your manager, their manager, and then directors/VPs) with genuine business justifications that actually looked at (no "asdf" here) to get access, and then it is usually only permitted for a window of months at most before it is auto-revoked. Then once you have access, every actual time you look at the data you need to provide justification (e.g. a ticket number that is actually checked to make sure it is open, not reused over and over, and not just 1234567890 etc and so on), and every single action you do with the data is tracked and audited so there is a complete 100% paper trail of who looked at what, when they did it, and why they were doing it, with traceability through to the tickets/bugs/etc for why there were even doing this in the first place. Abnormal things (e.g. systematic/repeated/etc) raises flags that do terrible things to your career. Each system/data source needs its own independent approval process.
There is no "god mode".
It is not uncommon for people to wait weeks for approvals to go through to access their own data to validate a bug fix etc. I think these safeguards are worthwhile - many would see them as a hindrance.
At past places, I implemented a call-centre UI once. We made it so that the service rep would initially not see anything about the customer, so the "Please can you confirm 3rd letter of your memorable word" or whatever meant that the service rep literally had a text box to type that letter in which had to match before they could proceed - they didn't see the whole world on screen and wait to see if the user got it right. I am not sure how common this is - when I do this from the customer side these days often the answer is immediately acknowledged by the rep without any kind of delay or typing noises so I am guessing they have my entire record on their screen and are just waiting for me to say the right things before continuing the call :(