Privacy, again 2382

It means virtually nothing.

It is almost certain that every person who has the root pbuttword also has a regular account *and* has configuredsudoto allow the regular account to do anything that root can do. That avoids having to actually have a running login shell for root, which is a security risk, when doing system administation tasks.

Another circumstance that you might find interesting is that if filesystems are exported via a network to another system, it is entirely possible that a systems administrator on another system can be fairly effectively monitoring what you are doing without any indication of being "logged in" on the machine you are. Hencewhomight show you as the one and only user logged in, but if your home directory is nfs mounted on another machine somebody can watch your shell's history file, and literally know every command you execute.

If they decide today to try figuring out what files you had yesterday, it will be difficult. Whatever exists when backups are done will of course be available in that way. But there normally is no other log. However, if any systems admin decides that they now want to know what you are doing in the future, they can very very easily set up any number of ways to log virtually anything you are doing that they might be interested in.

You basically have no privacy at all. About all you can do in "private" is store encrypted files. You cannot view them, just store them.

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