<i>&gt; world readable ... there was a culture where people expected friends to look at them</i><p>Same here. The default user home from &#x2F;etc&#x2F;skel (or some equivalent) had a user-access-only area that we were told to put sensitive work (individually marked projects where we were explicitly expected&#x2F;told not to collaborate on) and other such into. We could protect other directories a little more too if needed, or even open up bits of that one to &quot;group&quot; or &quot;other&quot; (at our own risk) and there were specific groups setup for explicitly collaborative projects (these days I would do away with that and control such collaboration through git or its ilk).