How serious is the issue of unintentional/malicious access to sensitive user information by programmers? <p>In a web application, for example, the password and other sensitive information could be logged or accessed in some other way even before it is hashed and saved to the database.</p> <p>Soemtimes, with very large applications, it may not always be possible to review all the code to prevent this from happening. A malicious programmer could easily print user's private information in a log file.</p> <p>I would like to know if this is a genuine threat and if there exist standard ways to prevent this type of information compromise.</p> <p>I am a web newbie so pardon me if this sounds like a trivial question. </p>