1) Obviously, adcom eavesdropping in these forums is not prohibited.
2) That doesn't make it any less like spying, eavesdropping, or like a judge clandestinely slipping into a therapy group designed for the people the judge will eventually be ruling on. The participants may reveal to one another things that they would have kept private from the judge. This is a kind of privacy violation, but in the case of these forums, probably not one that needs to be outlawed.
3) I'm not sure that any harm is done if
a) the judge didn't have to lie to get into the group
b) the judge's intent is not to procure information about individuals for purposes of court rulings (i.e., admissions decisions), but to procure general information about the experiences & responses of the judicants (i.e., applicants) to the judicial/application/interview process itself. This is actually with the intent to improve the process, and to serve the needs of the applicants better.
I have learned things about student job applicants before (through my observations & remembered experiences of interactions with students & with students organizations on campus) that would never be put on an application, or that would even be illegal for me to discuss in a job interview. In every case I either let someone else make the decision, or I worked to dissociate myself from the information I knew so that I could provide the applicant with a fair and unbiased assessment of their application & interview. This required me to "forget" things I had seen or heard, in the interests of what I thought were that student's right to privacy. Hopefully, any adcom people on this site will behave in a similar manner, even if they have evidence from this site that a particular applicant is a bit of an idiot.
Each of us on this site needs to remember that the people who come to know you online (and also in your ordinary, non-academic, life) may be someone who you have to work with or for professionally one day. I keep this in mind, and try to keep my responses clean, and my interactions with the idiots of this world as unabusive as I can manage. You never know if one of the people who see you flipping off the idiot driver will be both unimpressed by your display & in a position to complicate your life.
The kind of language and vulgar behaviors that might characterize your or my behavior at a bar while we hang out with our close friends is not really wise behavior in a place such as this, (even with our limited anonyminity) which is filled with both present and future colleagues, employees, and employers.
ON a related note:
In the orientation meeting for my interview day it was revealed by the dean that two of our interviewers had our AMCAS and the summary letters from our letter committees, while a third had all the details from our applications, including the secondary & COPIES OF ALL EMAILS & CORRESPONDENCE between us & the school, to date. This was unexpected, and I was immediately thankful that I had carefully composed my emails to the secretaries, assistants, etc. An extreme example, perhaps, but it did teach me a lesson
