The stack trace was forty lines
and you pasted the whole thing,
because it was faster than reading it.
Inside those forty lines
was a connection string,
a customer's email address,
an internal hostname,
and the name of a table
that tells a stranger
exactly how your billing works.
You did not intend to share any of that.
You intended to share an error.
This is the part
people keep getting wrong.
The question is not
whether the provider is trustworthy.
Most are.
Many will tell you in writing
that they do not train on your input.
The question is older and simpler.
Data left your control,
and you never decided that it would.
Look at what you actually paste.
A log line carries
whatever was in the request.
A config file carries
the shape of your infrastructure.
A schema carries your business.
A contract carries somebody else's name
and a clause they expected to stay private.
A support thread carries a person
who never agreed to any of this.
Some of it was never yours to give.
That line has nothing to do
with policy or risk appetite.
Data belonging to a customer,
a patient, an employee,
or another company under an agreement,
is not yours to hand to a third party
because it was convenient at four o'clock.
None of this means stop using the tools.
It means spend ten seconds
before the paste.
Trim the trace
to the frames you need.
Replace the real values.
Describe the schema
instead of shipping it.
Build the example
out of invented data,
which usually gets you a better answer,
because you were forced
to state the problem.
And know which door you walked in.
The account matters.
The plan matters.
A personal login and a company one
are different rooms
with different agreements.
Half the teams I know
have a written policy about this
and no idea what is being pasted,
which is a policy about nothing.
Paste is the easiest action
available on a computer.
That is precisely why
it deserves a pause.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
