Chris also1 recently commented that it is surprising that various operating systems do not automatically incorporate encryption into your basic profile. The following was my reply.
As to why windows did not, remember that of the various versions of windows that came before win 2k and XP, only NT and "windows for workgroups" (not well known, it came between windows 3.1 and windows 95, never sold much) had a true concept of multiple users. Notably, windows 98's multiple users functionality caused all sorts of settings and information to "leak" across accounts. Hardly the ideal environment for any type of automatic encryption use.
In today's world, where even substandard systems like windows have a decent concept of multiple users, incorporating encryption into the system's storage is far more possible. I am not sure how effective it would be though. Remember, in order to read and write to your encrypted files, the computer would have to "know" the key, that is store it in memory. (alternately, it could store the files in a ram disk, and then only need the key to sync the ram disk to the encrypted versions of the same files, but this is far more fragile as a computer crash would cause incalculable data loss, as the old pattern of "save often" would not necessarily save to non-violate memory (aka the hard drive).) The key, or the pass phrase (depending on the encryption scheme), is then vulnerable to attack by anyone else on the system with access to your memory (IE the person who hacked your computer last week because you run windows, or the system admin, or a virus). And losing a key causes far-reaching headaches, as I am sure you are aware.
Better than any pervasive scheme of encryption then, I think, is simply better (I.E. more widespread) understanding of it. Companies such as Tiger Privacy2 provide easy to use, and sufficiently secure, encryption for email that could be easily and widely deployed without too much trouble for users. While this has other problems (For example, it requires POP3, and thus emails are stored on the local drive, vs the (presumably) more trust worthy (I.E. more likely to be a RAID) server), it does demonstrate that encryption is not necessarily orthogonal to ease of use.
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