Can you prevent Admins seeing Personal Spaces?
Asked by Bristow:

I've been looking into the feasibility of using Personal Space's to track 1-2-1's.

I had a google and a [post](https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/202226/all-admins-can-see-personal-space---confluence) came up on here from about a year ago, so I figured I would re-ask, maybe something has changed?!

Now the content of these pages are obviously confidential to the user, and wouldn't want anyone to see the content.

Am I correct in thinking that there is no way to prevent Admins from seeing all the content of Personal Spaces, and their content?

++What have I tried?++

* I have removed all groups from the Space permissions, and only added the individual user with no anonymous access.
* I have then restricted the viewing of Space dashboard to the same individual user.
* I have edited the main dashboard so it only shows updates of our Spaces by hard coding these spaces (annoying bug with that [macro](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-14327)it seems).


Answers:
author: Rodrigo Girardi Adami
body: Hello Bristow,

That's correct. The behavior didn't changed from what I could search.on the latest versions of confluence. The administrators cannot see hidden contents from them, however an Admin can remove those restrictions letting them to see the contents again.

Cheers,

Rodrigo

comments: author: Bristow
body: See you say that, but when an Admin gets to a users Personal Space, you can see their dashboard, and then all the content on the left hand side etc.


author: Jonathan Simonoff
body: There are three kinds of Confluence administrators: in order of power: confluence administrators, system adminisrators, and super users. What makes this confusing is that the last one is assigned in a different way from the first two.

You can designate a groups or individuals with either system administrator or confluence administrator rights, and add people to those groups. I believe out-of-the-box, the confluence-admins group has system administrator access, and there is no group with confluence administrator access. You can change which groups have which access on the Global Permissions page.

As I said, super users are different. A super user is a member of the (confusingly named) confluence-administrators group (which has nothing to do with the level of admin called "confluence administrator"). Those people are also system administrators, and with out-of-the-box Confluence the obvious way to make someone a system administrator is to put them into that group.

This page explains it all: <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Global+Permissions+Overview>. The facts in that document are correct if, frankly, more than a bit confusing. I haven't read it carefully lately, but I believe it could say more clearly that the "confluence-administrators" group, unlike other groups, is defined in the software, and you can't change this special quality it has of defining super users.

System administrators who are not in the confluence-administrators group wouldn't be able to see restricted content, but would, as Rodrigo says, have rights to remove the restrictions.


Tags: administration

confluence-administration

restriction