I wonder how encryption, if it indeed becomes as widely used as many of us hope it does, will affect the ability of future historians to read all these archives.<p>All of my computers and backups are encrypted. If I were to drop dead tomorrow or suffer some kind of memory loss, 99% of the documents and pictures I own will turn into meaningless blobs, assuming the cryptography in the products I use are any good. I have no intention to print out the keys and give them to someone while I&#x27;m still young and healthy. Part of the reason is that I believe those files should die with me. There&#x27;s nothing incriminating, nor anything particularly embarrassing, it&#x27;s just nobody else&#x27;s effin&#x27; business. That&#x27;s what privacy means to me.<p>And yet, it is the business of historians and librarians to poke into dead people&#x27;s private documents and learn from them. In an ideal future society, maybe it will be historians, not spooks, who try to break commonly used encryption methods.