Not obvious that giving your account a password is not physical security

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

If you have a user account with a password, someone with physical access to your computer can still access your account by holding down Shift during startup, choosing recovery mode, and changing your password.

This is an intractable problem. For example, from Microsoft's "10 immutable laws of security": "If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore". <http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc722487.aspx#EIAA>

However, probably it isn't obvious to a non-professional that a password alone isn't enough to secure their stuff.

So perhaps, wherever Ubuntu lets you set a password (Ubiquity, System Settings "User Accounts"), it should contain a brief (very brief) explanation of this. Something like: "A password doesn’t protect against someone with physical access to the computer."

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

* They can change the password, but not retrieve it (only salted hash is available)
* They will not be able to access personal files, if encryption was enabled (full disk or home directory only)

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

If the "Encrypt the new Ubuntu installation for security" checkbox explained that a password alone isn't physical security, and if people would remember that explanation by the time they arrived at the "Who are you?" step, that would be enough. But I don't think either of those is the case. This needs a little design work.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This issue has sat incomplete for more than 60 days now. I'm going to close it as invalid. Please feel free re-open if this is still an issue for you. Thank you.