What are the best practices for handling sessions and data privacy in PHP?

To handle sessions and data privacy in PHP, it is important to use secure session handling techniques such as using HTTPS, setting secure session cookie parameters, and properly sanitizing and validating user input to prevent data leakage.

// Start a secure session
session_start([
    'cookie_lifetime' => 86400, // 1 day
    'cookie_secure' => true, // Only send cookies over HTTPS
    'cookie_httponly' => true, // Prevent access to cookies via JavaScript
]);

// Sanitize and validate user input
$username = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'username', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$password = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'password', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Perform necessary actions with sanitized user input