If you trust the box.<p>That said, if you have a secure trusted machine with FDE that you don&#x27;t let strangers touch, and where every piece of software is well-isolated (for example, web browser is sandboxed and can&#x27;t access the ~&#x2F;.password-store&#x2F;), then yeah, filesystem permissions will do the trick.<p>But, for example, if you sync using git repo hosted on some third-party VPS then directory permissions won&#x27;t protect you from that host owner or whoever gains superuser access to the filesystem.<p>(Hey, don&#x27;t downvote the parent, he didn&#x27;t said anything wrong, just asked a question! In my opinion that <i>contributes</i> to the discussion.)