I discovered this behaviour under XP, did not chack against MacOS yet:

I log in as Guest, with the standard Read-Only privilege (confirmed by a calc field that displays account / access). FM7 (Dev 7.0v3) prevents me from changing anything... EXCEPT that I can change any *global* field without problems. And the changes are not just visible in the layout, they really go to the database.

Did I miss something? Or did FM? Can anyone confirm?

(puzzled)

I can now confirm that it is a behaviour that FMP 7.0v3 has on all platforms, and independent of the account name. All global fields can be accessed and changed by users who only have read access to the database.

My conclusion: it is a feature, not a bug.

Because globals are local to each client, I don't know if "it really goes to the database." It does for the moment, but as soon as you close the file your global changes are gone.

I would agree that it's a feature. I've seen it when I've restricted record-level Editing privileges to only those records belonging to the current account. I have scripts which use globals to temporarily hold and pass values. I was glad to see that the scripts still work.

I guess if you want to secure a global field you'd do so by not allowing Field Behavior access to it on the layout.