HP does government consulting, it's quite likely they were working on an application that needed access to that data. When I was a civilian working in Navy medicine (building apps), that was often the case.
As a Navy physician trying to get IRB-approved research done, could you kindly share what kind of app needs a lone developer to have 134k SSNs on a laptop?
There are lots of very legitimate reasons, but a very common example might be vendor upgrades of core software for coding, integrations, dictation, etc. Fairly standard procedure to do (at least) a one off just in case backup of a database before running a big code update.
Haha. Okay. I would hazard a guess that you haven't worked on real world apps then. Users will do things that you cannot predict. They will break things like never before.
I've written plenty of code that checks out against out test environment, but it'll choke on a weird thing in production. You NEED access to real data if you're going to make any progress in that scenario.
Yep, precisely. And it's not just the users that fuck up either. Sometimes, other systems you have to integrate with are also poorly designed and don't have proper control mechanisms in place. For instance, I'm working on integrating with another system right now where the zip_code field has values like "don't know". You're never going to be able to cover for things like that unless you have access to the real dataset.
You're not living in the real world. Users do weird things.
At some point someone will legally change their name to an emoji and it'll break a whole load of systems. Nobody saw that coming when they originally built some middleware in 1998.
