Proposal: Personal Data Encryption (maybe SoC?)

Tue Mar 20 05:34:36 CET 2007

Jim McDonald writes:
>>>Yep but on the flipside if you have some data that you want encrypted 
>then encrypting all of it won't do any harm (perhaps a slightly slower 
>response time, and assuming some sort of key caching going on the 
>occasional entering of a decryption token, perhaps on unlock and 'phone 
>startup?). Having to choose for each piece of data if it is encrypted 
>or not, and having to handle that in every application individually, is 
>a great example of where choice can be too much. I think that having a 
>single system-wide setting and handling it appropriately (and far enough 
>down the stack so that applications don't have to worry about it) would 
>provide a simple and uniform approach to this problem without 
>continually asking the user to decide which data is to be encrypted and 
>which not.

We certainly don't want that as a separate step -- my notion would be
to have Save As vs. Save As Encrypted. Once you've saved something as
encrypted once, it keeps getting saved encrypted. And then the
sudo-model of only entering a key if you haven't looked at anything
encrypted for some time interval.