Glossary
View-As Mode
View-as mode is a support-tooling feature that lets staff see what a specific user sees — their data, their configuration, their current state — in order to troubleshoot an issue, without staff actually becoming that user in every respect the way a full account takeover would. Done well, it's scoped narrowly to viewing and diagnosing, explicitly logged, and often requires the affected user's awareness or consent before or during use.
Done carelessly, it becomes a broad, quietly-used impersonation capability indistinguishable in practice from actually taking over the account — able to act, not just observe, and used routinely rather than only when genuinely needed for support. The gap between the well-scoped version and the careless one is entirely in how deliberately the tooling's actual capability and its logging were designed.