> Should it happen everywhere?

Yes. The market has spoken. People find terms of use acceptable, which includes looking at personal data. The alternative is to restrict your data team to the point where conversions would be half or a third of what they are. Are most people willing to pay triple just to remove the off chance that some random data guy comes across their info? Probably not.

> As a data guy, do you have professional obligations to uphold the privacy policy and operate within the law?

Any person, employee or not, professional or not, has obligations to uphold just laws; certainly including measures of privacy.

Here is a typical privacy policy:

"We use personal information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the Site, to provide to you the services offered by the Site; resolve service and billing disputes; troubleshoot problems; bill any amounts due from you; measure consumer interest in our products and services, inform you about online and offline offers, products, services, events and updates; deliver information to you that, in some cases, is relevant to your interests, such as product news; customize your experience; detect and protect us against error, fraud and other criminal activity; enforce our Terms of Use; provide you with system or administrative messages, and as otherwise described to you at the time of collection. On occasion we use email address or other contact information to contact our Users to ask them for their input on our services, and to forward to them media opportunities.

We may also use personal information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyze Site usage, to improve our content and product offerings, and to customize the Site's content, layout, and services. These uses improve the Site and better tailor it to meet your needs, so as to provide you with a smooth, efficient, safe and customized experience while using the Site."

That bottom paragraph is fully communicating the nature of the relationship. Outside any law that would render the above unlawful, it is well within the law for an employee to "SELECT * FROM users WHERE created_at > 2010-02-01" or to "SELECT * FROM todos JOIN users ON todos.user_id = users.id WHERE users.profession = 'developer'". There are perfectly valid reasons to do these types of things. Anti-fraud measures, site optimization, etc.

> What are the mechanisms available to the market and the industry to prevent the deterioration of customers' trust with us?

This is a problem of mismatched expectations and priorities. It's a lot like politics. In an ideal world a politician would be able to say something like 'I think the American people acted irresponsibly financing homes and that is a good part of the reason for the financial crisis' because it is the truth and it would help people in the long run to hear it, as well as help any policy formation in response to it. But practically they can blame others and get away with it.

Unless the industry is willing to educate politicians, site users, etc. There is no reason to go out shouting that this happens. It's already in the terms of use and the privacy policy. Do you think people want to know what Air Miles does with their data?

The only mechanism besides general silence (as well as inclusion in the privacy policy and/or terms of use) would be full, 100% truth when asked. But why make an issue of it? The netizens don't really care. If they did there would be competition around this angle of the market.

dhh hides behind: "I don't think it has to be this way. We often run internal reports on usage of certain features, but it's always aggregated, and never looks at the individual data. I feel bad enough looking at a customer's account when they've specifically asked me to do so from a support request.

I would certainly terminate any account with a company that willfully was reading my private data and opening files for the mere sport of it."

That carefully worded bullshit. Internal reports are not exploring. Internal reports are what you show at the monthly marketing or board meeting. C_Os get internal reports. Data guys test recommendation models. Data guys find out the interesting patterns to include in custom reports.

Also, His last paragraph is ridiculous. Obviously we don't read data for sport. In fact it is boring. You go through data for trends.