Read Access to Parent, but No Access to Child - Master/Detail

Question

I have a master-detail relationship between two custom objects.

I have read, create, edit on the parent record, but no access at all to the child due to profile permissions for the user I am looking at.

I thought if you had read access to the parent object you could by extension have read access to the child object, but it appears in the profile settings you can explicitly set the child object to have "No Access".

Why is this allowed if it's a master-detail relationship?

Answer 1

Suppose you had a Master object called SpecialForcesUnit with fields like:

• Unit Name
• Unit Origination Date

and a detail object called:

TeamMember with fields like:

• Name
• Speciality
• Hometown

Clearly some profiles/permission sets should have access to both master and detail but other profiles/permission sets might only get access to the master.

The example is contrived but should motivate the reasoning behind the feature.