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Show Data as Table and Security

Chris Webb explains that hiding a column isn’t the same thing as preventing access to a column:

In the last few months the following issue has been escalated up to the Power BI CAT team several times: customers have deployed reports into production and then found that users are able to see data they should not be allowed to see by using the “Show data point as a table” feature. The question is: is this a security hole? It isn’t, and in this blog post I’ll explain why and how you should think about security as something that happens on the dataset and not in the report.

My official response is “Hmm…” I don’t disagree with Chris, but I do understand how people might not know this and get blindsided because they think they’ve prevented someone from seeing a sensitive column. I think part of my reaction is that this functionality isn’t blaringly obvious to report developers, and so there’s a little bit of “How could you know this could happen?”