Ignoring the “the bug was raised four years ago” part and assuming you just mean it isn't as easy as that and might break other things: what other things could resolving this potentially break? If the issue is that the PII needs to be present for private/authenticated views, would not making it unavailable everywhere including there, and fixing that later, be the better option over leaving the PII present for public views for a second longer?
What are you doing to address the support issues that allowed such a privacy issue to remain after being reported?
What are you doing to address the issues with the company's prioritisation framework that allowed such a privacy issue to remain for 4 years?
Which authorities are you reporting the privacy issue to in line with local requirements?
4 years.
https://cleanshot.com/share/trYdqYFZ
This is pretty meh. We will deploy more explicit messaging while we mitigate this properly.
There is a way to mitigate this. Re-hash and cache the page to be meta-less for public URLs. I guess that requires a huge amount of coding for a team that has not built the product from the ground up. But I feel like a "copy and paste" could fix that (remove author data).
Nonsense! It is a 1 minute fix. You just don't want to take a $ hit from inconveniencing users by breaking another part of your app.
Pull your thumb out and do the right thing. Implement the 1 minute fix, and then spend the rest of the week or month fixing the other parts of your app that might break as a result of fixing this.