PAUL says…

It’s certainly reasonable of you to question the appropriateness of the request. Apple acknowledges such concerns at apple.co/2enve2C, but the advice there is drastic and could be time-consuming. Sometimes, members of the MacFormat team have followed it, but when it’d be a great inconvenience we’ve instead created another user account for support staff to use. We’ve have never received an objection from them when taking that approach.