[nudgeee]

Indeed, this is a common vector for leaking PII and sensitive data. For example, what looks like an innocuous logging/print statement in an exception handler ends up leaking all sorts of data.

And it gets more messy when you start to ingest and warehouse data logs for on-call monitoring/analytics/etc, and now you have PII floating around in all sorts of data stores that need to be scrubbed.

In a previous job, we handled credit card numbers. We added PII detectors to logging libraries that would scrub anything that looked like a credit card number. We used client-side encryption where the credit card numbers are encrypted on the client before sending to the backend, so the backend systems never see the plain credit card numbers, except for the system that tokenizes them.