First: This is documented and we also warn users when they publish a page. But, that’s not good enough!
Second: We don’t like this and are looking at ways to fix this either by removing the PII from the public endpoints or by replacing it with an email proxy similar to GitHub’s equivalent functionality for public commits.
P.S: Some folks here have speculated that this should be a 1 minute fix. Unfortunately that is not the case. :(
4 years.
https://cleanshot.com/share/trYdqYFZ
This is pretty meh. We will deploy more explicit messaging while we mitigate this properly.
There is a way to mitigate this. Re-hash and cache the page to be meta-less for public URLs. I guess that requires a huge amount of coding for a team that has not built the product from the ground up. But I feel like a "copy and paste" could fix that (remove author data).
Ignoring the “the bug was raised four years ago” part and assuming you just mean it isn't as easy as that and might break other things: what other things could resolving this potentially break? If the issue is that the PII needs to be present for private/authenticated views, would not making it unavailable everywhere including there, and fixing that later, be the better option over leaving the PII present for public views for a second longer?
What are you doing to address the support issues that allowed such a privacy issue to remain after being reported?
What are you doing to address the issues with the company's prioritisation framework that allowed such a privacy issue to remain for 4 years?
Which authorities are you reporting the privacy issue to in line with local requirements?
Nonsense! It is a 1 minute fix. You just don't want to take a $ hit from inconveniencing users by breaking another part of your app.
Pull your thumb out and do the right thing. Implement the 1 minute fix, and then spend the rest of the week or month fixing the other parts of your app that might break as a result of fixing this.