Two things you can’t treat as add-ons

Security and privacy are easy to underinvest in. They don’t produce visible features. They rarely show up in marketing. Their value is in the bad things they prevent, which never happen if you do them well — and then it’s hard to attribute the absence of those bad things back to your work.

But they’re also two of the most consequential areas in any modern product. Get them wrong, and the damage can be severe and long-lasting. Get them right, and they quietly underwrite the trust that everything else depends on.

You don’t need to be a security expert. You do need a working sense of what matters, where the common pitfalls are, and how to handle this without either ignoring it or being paralysed by it.

Security: protecting against bad actors

Security is a...

Security and privacy for modern products