Why might a support agent need to log in to my account?

We recently built a tool that allows support agents and developers to log into user accounts in order to better troubleshoot account-specific situations. We might use this to see if progress isn't saving correctly on a specific video, to investigate why a child can't link to their parent, or to better understand the teacher view of someone with many different classes. Or many, many other potential support situations.

Great... what's not to love?

This is going to be a huge help, and we're really excited to be able to support people and fix bugs more quickly this way. However, due to technical limitations, there is one big caveat about agreeing to let a staff member log into your account that we want to be transparent about: when we log in there's no way for our system to know that we're not a genuine user - so any actions we take will be as if you took them.  

Most likely, any logged actions will be taken in the pursuit of fixing the problem - adding a student on your behalf, for example - but it also might mean logging unexpected progress or activity in subjects you know you weren't working on. In this case, you might see confusing recent activity, so we want to be very clear about why that might be.

If you recently filed a support ticket and opted into letting us log into your account, you may end up having some small amount of unexpected activity. We will always do our best to minimize this.

From the legal team

This is the legal summary when you agree to let a support agent log into your account:

"You are agreeing to allow a member of the Khan Academy support team to log in under your username to resolve a support issue. We will only use this functionality to help resolve a technical issue and will log out of your account upon completion of this task. We will not take any user actions outside of those necessary to provide the support you requested. For security purposes, we are also logging this event in our internal records. By saying yes, you agree to have a member of the KA support team logging in under your username."