For most of my files, I don’t care who sees them. I don’t have much to hide. And I also assume that everyone’s too busy with their own work to bother with what I’m doing.
But here and there, I have files that are actually important, and which I want to keep under wraps. Even if you don’t lock your doors at home, there are probably a few things that you want to protect, such as your great-aunt’s diamonds, your childrens’ birth certificates, and your ninth-grade love letters.
On a UNIX system, the sorts of things I might want to keep other people from reading are personal mail messages, resumes, embarrassingly bad poetry I’ve written, and an angry memo that I wisely never sent but held onto anyway. There are also files that I don’t mind other people seeing, but I mind them changing, such as my .cshrc and .login files.
Similarly, there are files on the system that need to be protected from me. For example, if I could see other people’s mail files, I might be tempted to read mail between managers about problems with another employee or learn something else that’s really none of my business.
Security is needed to prevent damage to the system and to protect the privacy of each user.
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