I've got stuff I don't want to be public, but at the same time I'm not going to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on security measures to protect it because it'll probably never be required, and it probably won't work anyway.
Having a pin code longer than four digits is probably more than enough to effectively deter the average cop, and they are all I am ever really anticipating interacting with, if at all. If I decide to take up terrorism as a hobby I may reconsider.
What is this setup that requires thousands and thousands of dollars to achieve encryption? It's just typing 'y' and hitting enter during my install, if anything. It's good general practice and the highest cost involved is a totally negligible effort to type an additional password in at boot. It's not like we were talking about rigging up some crazy kill switch that somehow physically destroy your drives at a keystroke if you think the feds have shown up.
Uh, no. Almost everything you can do for logical security only requires free software. Something as easy as ticking the box "encrypt my drive" and putting in a good password when installing Ubuntu or whatever is about as easy as it gets and is LUKS2 ("actual security", as far as at-rest data encryption is concerned).
Why did you feel the need to come into this thread and broadcast your opinion on something you know nothing about? Encryption is not made any less effective just because people made free tools to implement it easily.
It's just math. It's not a finite resource, and there isn't "premium math" you have to go buy at the math store to make your encryption stronger.
I think what you’re driving at is partially true: for perfect security, it takes a lot of effort and you never know when there’s a zero day for your particular practice.
However, like the other commenter is saying, it’s easy to have better security than most. Heck, it don’t even require extra ongoing maintenance to have a healthy security coverage.
But not doing anything to increase your security is a bad choice. To me, it’s kind of like eating vegetables, if the average person would just do it a little more, we would all benefit.
For the record, that's as fine as any other hobby, as far as I'm concerned. Just as I don't have any issues with... you know, survivalism as a hobby.
On the aggregate, though, there IS a bit of a prepper power fantasy at play, I stand by that. Hey, I have tons of hobbies myself where I find the collective average lands in a super creepy place. If anything I think it's a relief to acknowledge it. Gives you plausible deniability.