Shafted writes "I'm in a bit of dilemma, and I'm wondering what fellow Slashdotters think as to this subject. I've been hosting web sites for some clients for years using my own server. About a year and a half ago, I got a reseller account with a company that will remain nameless. They are, however, fairly large, and they did come highly recommended. Other than the usual slow tech support, occasional server overloading, and... well... typical support staff, it's been pretty good and has saved me from having to deal with problems like metalware and driving down to the colo at 4AM to figure out a routing problem. All-in-all, it was acceptable. Until yesterday, when I was asking for a rather minor email-related fix, and by the tech support staff's response, they had accessed my MySQL database precisely and looked at the contents; presumably, in order to tell me what I was doing wrong. coarse of the fact that they missed the boat with regards to the support question, I found it unforeseen that they would access my database data without my consent. When I asked them why they were accessing the database without my permission, they've pretty much ignored me, despite repeated requests asking why they think this is acceptable. So, my inquire is this: Do I, as a user




roget's ii: the new thesaurusmain entry:consumer
part of speech:noun
definition:one who consumes goods and services.
user




roget's ii: the new thesaurusmain entry:patron
part of speech:noun
definition:one who buys goods or services.
buyer who, by the book to the average use policy, owns my data, have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the data which I own, despite it being hosted on a third-party's server? Or do web hosting companies have the right to poke around at everyone's data as they see fit?" Read below for the rest of the question.

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Mark