Proposal: Personal Data Encryption (maybe SoC?)

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Jim McDonald writes:
>Jonathon Suggs wrote:
>> One of the biggest mantra's I hear coming from the FOSS camp is "choice"
>> and so keeping with the whole practice what you preach ideal, I think
>> the level of encryption should be a user configurable preference.
>>   
>I'd caveat that with comment that one of the biggest bugbears against 
>the FOSS camp is "usability" so if this type of thing is going to be 
>implemented then it should be a single system-wide option that gets 
>handled away in the backend so that applications don't even need to know 
>about it and that users don't have to pick and choose (or worse, select 
>on a per-application basis) what data is encrypted.

We certainly want a global scheme -- but I think we do want a
per-data-item granularity.  I've certainly got things on my phone
whose protection I don't care about (shopping lists) and other things
that have legal implications (notes on how various students' class
presentations went).  I want to be able to choose "save this encrypted"
vs. "save this", and then when I access data I've encrypted I have to
enter the password.