These same people are writing the code that fetches user data from the databases, renders it, handles events and so forth. Trusting those people with access to

These same people are writing the code that fetches user data from the databases, renders it, handles events and so forth. Trusting those people with access to user data doesn't seem like a huge stretch. My experience from being heavily isolated from live data at Microsoft was that we were slow to respond to customer issues. We didn't touch people; we had to have special permission to get blinded historical data, much less anything live. Yet I was at least partially responsible for writing the systems that kept PII private. It's easy to freak out about stuff you don't understand.