Given the situation that you have any data that is bound to privacy regulation, or any data-protection-regulation:
Do you think this represents a security vulnerability? Yes
Do you think this is a bad practice? Yes
Do you happen to have an alternative? Yes
Do you think this is necessary? Yes
Is the risk worth it? No
Most importantly: By law the GDPR does not allow you to grant your developers access to data at all.
The altenative is to test locally, or on any other test-environment (tst, acc, etc). You should not copy production data towards those environments, but if you do, then you should anonymise it first.
Why not debug locally? Just download the database and replicate as that user the bugs / problems. Not that you do not need certain admin overview pages to easily view some data. But for debugging I would always just download the database and check locally the problem.
Regards,
Ronald
I agree to the extent that it is often useful to have some type of elevated admin role, even in production. I'd be wary of giving them write access however, often just read will be enough for troubleshooting. You will often need dev-type roles anyway to be responsible for kicking off scripts an other post-release activities.
In a bigger company with more controls, this admin role is not a developer. In fact, every effort is taken to keep developers away from anything to do with prod. Instead this admin role is for a specific IT support staff, and access is carefully considered.
Hi Marcian,
Please make sure