It's really about personal privacy. Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold. If you don't want others reading your email, viewing your pictures, seeing your tax returns, etc. then you should encrypt the drive.

I call this "The Pawn Shop Threat Model" ;)

And, IME it is likely to happen.

I have purchased 6 multi Tb external drives at estate sales. My son brought home a few from a summer working as a mover. In his experience it was divorcing spouses throwing out each others stuff.

All of these drives had Pii and personal photos. Some of the estate sale drives included pii of children and grandchildren.

> Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold.

Likely? How likely is it? I've never had a computer stolen, nor has anybody I personally know. So it doesn't seem to me like it's all that likely.

Personally, I find whole disk encryption to be more risky than it's worth. I much prefer encrypting things on a file-level instead.

It's been a while since I've set up a windows machine and this may already be mentioned, but when I sign up for signal I got lots of warnings that were like "warning if you lose your phone and encryption key you will lose your data"

That way I know what I'm signing up for.

Just put "encrypt? Yes no" in the on-boarding flow and let people know what the risks are and what they may be protecting against. I'd probably default to off because people don't read wizards and the last thing someone wants is to lose their entire HDD because they accidentally made a decision they didn't understand.

And maybe for a certain period of time they can nudge users to read about encryption and decide if it's right for them, or just easily disable that nudge. Maybe even basic education like "if you find yourself forgetting your password often then maybe encryption is not for you" or something like that.

Windows is already optimized for extracting as much value from customers as possible, may as well help them make at least one informed decision.

Your computer is not "likely" to be stolen and sold.

> It's really about personal privacy. Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold. If you don't want others reading your email, viewing your pictures, seeing your tax returns, etc. then you should encrypt the drive.

There is a very real security vs. availability trade-off though. Is the average person more concerned with others reading their emails, viewing their pictures, seeing their tax returns, or are they more concerned with losing access to those things themselves?

Losing access to an encrypted drive is a very real possibility (people often forget their passwords, and are used to that being recoverable), and is the data loss is probably more impactful than privacy loss for many people.

And the worst part is, I have seen computer repair shops that refuse to work with a laptop if it has an encrypted system drive, under the guise of "how would we then validate the fix?"

For the typical user, this is far far far more likely to happen than that they would “pop out” the drive and read it in another machine.

Defaults should be safe for most users. Power users are exactly the people who can deal with changing a setting. It’s constantly surprising to me when technical people insist that defaults should be optimized for technical people.

Surely not likely at all for a gaming desktop that's going nowhere in my home.

For business users with notebooks who fly around a lot or spend time in coffee shops, it's possible.

> Your computer is likely to be stolen and sold.

No, it’s not.