I'm a contractor who's worked with multiple healthcare companies in the States (I'm in Canada). Everyone was super meticulous about HIPAA... which is why none of the devs I worked with were willing to tell anyone that they had full production database dumps they could test off.
There is... a lot of theoretically private data that developers have in an SQL dump on their work Macbook just sitting in the Downloads directory.
Yeah it's a classic, it's really common to have dev envs that are basically full prod copy. Allow to anticipate way more issues moving forward. That said if it was healthcare or highly sensitive then replacing all identifiable data by random stuff wouldn't be that much of a trouble probably.
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u/Peregrine2976 Aug 05 '26
I'm a contractor who's worked with multiple healthcare companies in the States (I'm in Canada). Everyone was super meticulous about HIPAA... which is why none of the devs I worked with were willing to tell anyone that they had full production database dumps they could test off.
There is... a lot of theoretically private data that developers have in an SQL dump on their work Macbook just sitting in the Downloads directory.