Comment 0 for bug 878906

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.

There 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."