It's 4:47 PM on a Friday. A stakeholder pings you: "Hey, can we get the support tickets table into the warehouse? The CS team wants to chart ticket volume by region."
Sounds harmless. One table, one SELECT *, done before standup Monday.
You glance at the schema. Eighteen columns of pure innocence — ticket_id, status, created_at — and then column nineteen: support_notes. Free text. Years of customers writing things like:
Hi, this is Jane Doe, my order #4311 never arrived. I'm at jane.doe@example.com, or call me on 555-010-8899. Billing zip is 94110. Also my card ending in 4242 keeps failing??
Congratulations: your "harmless analytics table" is now one of the most sensitive assets in the company.
