This talk tells the story of how I tried to solve a problem - and in doing so, understood how push notifications actually work. Why my first approach didn’t scale. Why almost every app uses Firebase or APNs. Why even Signal knocks at Google’s door. And why, since the Wyden letter of 2023, this is a documented privacy problem: “We kill people based on metadata.”

You can not sacrifice privacy to get security, that’s like tearing down the house to build a fence. Privacy is how security looks like from within those walls, security is how privacy looks like from outside those walls, they are two sides of that same wall.

I really love this article. There’s a lot of nuance, and difficult concessions to pragmatism, that we make in our lives.

It can be hard, but sometimes we really do need to bite bullet for the good of all.