I haven't used protobuf so I might be mistaken here, but it's not necessary to use the same variable name. In other words, I can use date_of_birth and you can

I haven't used protobuf so I might be mistaken here, but it's not necessary to use the same variable name. In other words, I can use date_of_birth and you can use birthdate so long as we both agree that the first item in the message is the date a person was born. So you can reverse engineer a protobuf message without creating a direct copy.