PII in Your Logs Is a GDPR Time Bomb - Here's How to Defuse It

Application logs often inadvertently capture PII such as emails, passwords, and SSNs through normal debugging practices, creating compliance risks under GDPR and HIPAA. The article advocates masking PII at log ingestion rather than at display, ensuring no personal data ever reaches storage. It details building a Node.js masking layer with three strategies—partial masking, full redaction, and deterministic hashing—to handle PII in structured fields, embedded strings, and encoded formats.