Abuse of viewall
I think we've all been led to believe that the "viewall" tool is given to a certain few people for the purposes of viewing protected/private entries in only the most extreme circumstances, such as finding contact info for a suspected suicide, or in the context of a serious complaint in which a certain post must be accessed for legitimate abuse research purposes.

That said, while everyone was busy making a private post in their journals with their contact info, for use in an emergency, I added an image bug to a private post in mine. Today, after a second post at DramaFiles regarding the abuse policy document, I logged two people accessing this file:



Host: 130.68.51.xxx
Http Code: 404 Date: Nov 30 17:14:26 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 5
Referer: http://www.livejournal.com/users/johnbot/?viewall=1
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.11

Host: 64.105.162.xxx
Http Code: 404 Date: Nov 30 17:17:02 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 5
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-2)


Note that the first actually has the viewall URL in the referrer field. I tracked the IPs, and the first hails from Rahaeli's home state of New Jersey. The second is in Seattle.

I'm sure the posts have ticked off a few of the admins, and they have every right to be. But am I out of line to expect that, per the Abuse policy document itself, stuff that happens off-site would not be a legitimate reason to start invading my privacy? Surely the desire to find out who their mole might be would not outweigh the "rights" of an individual users.

Of course I know that they are free to do whatever they want, but in light of the claims we've all heard, I thought that people might want to be aware of this usage.