Admins can still read anyone's PM's by downloading the database

[downey (Michael Downey)]

It really is a waste of time to discuss this.

Are you saying you’ve changed your mind since the below comments and that you’re no longer in favor of auditing admin activities throughout the application?

it’s a deeply-ingrained idea that access to a user’s personal data by an admin should always leave a very visible audit trail.

I think that’s a fine requirement and one that Stack Exchange has moved toward strongly – you can view personal stuff like a user’s email address but it takes an explicit click to do so, and it is also logged as a staff action in that user’s profile. Sounds good to me! We don’t have this yet, though, and we need it for a broad spectrum of staff actions including both moderator stuff (I banned this user) and admin stuff (I changed this setting).