There are also a ton of tables where they made a backup copy of the table and just left it in the database for years. Ditto switching to new coce but not cleaning up the old data. So even data that would normally be removed due to, say, expiring domains ends up being preserved.

I recommend digging through it to anybody who is sad about the systems you run at work. It's such a fractal set of fuckups that I promise you'll feel better about your legacy systems.

[1] https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Epik

[2] in PHP serialization format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP_serialization_format

Or passwords these people use for other services.

We needed to log that kind of data during development and just tagging what messages were sensitive would have been too error prone, so we couldnt reliably have any logs once we went live.

We did however have a special crash handler that logged the exception type and callstack, but not even the exception message could touch the harddrive.

In this case, it is permitted to collect the log and keep them temporarily (24h or so). A workflow to keep deleting older logs or scrub the logs must be installed in this case.

I found out a few years back that a large industrial device our company made was recording all users passwords due to a logging statement that was blindly just logging every piece of user input via UI.