Ziatron wrote:
Moreover, there have been occasions where people have been forced to divulge passwords, so FileVault isn't a complete answer for people using 8TB HDDs.
While there are varying levels of security available for various applications, nothing is going to stop an adversary with sufficient motivation, time, and resources. Even if you are using a hard drive and perform the highest level of secure deletion on a file, traces of the information you deleted may still be scattered across your computer within temp files, cache files, log files, virtual memory, and in RAM.
So when thinking of security, you need to decide how sensitive is the information and how sophisticated your adversary.
If you want to keep a family member from stumbling upon your web browsing history, that's relatively easy to do. If you want to protect personal and financial information on your hard drive or SSD when reselling a computer, that takes a bit more planning and effort. If you make a living in organized crime and the FBI is your adversary, that takes greater precautions still. And if your computer contains valuable military or industrial secrets and your adversary is a hostile foreign government, that's going to take a maximum amount of effort, which will come with a significant degree of complexity and inconvenience.
As Apple serves the consumer market, they only need to focus on the first and second scenarios, which they address with features like full disk encryption and private browsing mode on Safari. If you're conducting criminal activity or handling sensitive, high value data, then an off the shelf consumer product will not serve your needs out of the box.