Encryption protects your data if your phone falls into someone else’s hands. The new Google Pixel and Pixel XL are encrypted by default to offer strong data protection, while maintaining a great user experience with high I/O performance and long battery life. In addition to encryption, the Pixel phones debuted running the Android Nougat release, which has even more security improvements.
This blog post covers the encryption implementation on Google Pixel devices and how it improves the user experience, performance, and security of the device.
These kinds of things should’ve been default a long time ago.
From my perspective, and I think many other users, hard drive encryption would be just one more thing that can go terribly wrong with my data.
Many users do not care about “securing” their local data against an attacker with access to the hardware. Securing it against loss through corruption/accidental deletion/loss of key during e.g. OS reinstallation is a much higher priority.
This is not in any way a comment about network security
Well, they should. Without it a simple theft can escalate from “lost my phone” to “lost my identity”. It’s not just the device that was pwned, your life can be as well, depending on how savvy the other party is.
I refuse to handle a mobile device that is not encrypted and even my home computer is encrypted, with backups encrypted as well.
I can’t stress how important disk encryption really is.