Developer finds privacy policy exposed critical data retention bugs in his own SaaS code

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A developer rewriting his SaaS privacy policy for Google app review discovered that carefully describing his system's actual behavior revealed several serious compliance gaps in the code. His policy promised a 30-day data retention window after cancellation, but investigation showed deleted teams were never actually purged due to missing hard-delete logic, while user accounts were wiped immediately with no grace period. Activity logs were configured to be stored indefinitely rather than the 12-month minimum required under Brazil's Marco Civil, violating the policy in the opposite direction. A data-export feature referenced in the policy did not exist for team owners at all — an AI assistant had inferred its existence from a related controller name, producing a confident but false clause. The developer concluded that an honest privacy policy functions as a disguised code audit, and that AI-generated legal text is especially risky because plausible-sounding language rarely receives the same scrutiny as a pull request.

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