Dennes Torres points out a change to dynamic data masking in Azure SQL DB:
Dynamic data mask is a very interesting security feature allowing us to mask critical fields such as e-mail, phone number, credit card and so on. We can decide what users will be able to see the value of these features or not.
This feature faced many flaws when it was released, but I believe it’s stable now, although It’s not the main security feature you should care about, it can still be very useful.
However, until very recently, this feature was not very useful. If you mask many fields in many different tables, the fields may require different permission levels in order to be unmasked.
I agree that this is definitely not a security feature. But hey, at least it’s a bit more useful than it was before.