sanitize_sql_for_conditions unnecessarily protected?

In ActiveRecord::Sanitization::ClassMethods, the method sanitize_sql_for_conditions and its aliases sanitize_sql and sanitize_conditions are marked as protected.

However, internally Rails makes several calls to this method via send(:sanitize_sql...) to bypass the protected nature of the method.

I believe that if it needs to be used via send then it probably shouldn’t be marked as protected.

Is there any reason why we could remove the protected marker on this method and convert the send usages to normal method calls?