Encrypt What You Can ⇥ propublica.org

ProPublica is publishing some excerpts from Julia Angwin’s new book. This particular excerpt deals with encryption, which is generally a good practice. In fact, assuming you’re smart and keep backups, and you have a modern fast hard drive (or, obviously, an SSD), there’s almost no reason to not encrypt your drive.

There is a minor issue with the advice, though:

Apple doesn’t let you encrypt your smart phone’s hard drive or the files on it, though it allows encryption of your phone’s backup files on iTunes or iCloud.

In fact, every iPhone since the 3GS has had hardware encryption enabled by default. When you choose to “Erase All Content and Settings”, it simply throws away the key. Though, currently, there’s a bug: it’s not encrypting email attachments. Whoops.