Yep! They don't teach this stuff because consumer level cyber security is in the absolute pits of despair and moreover, they're trying to do away with what little we have access to. Governments and police agencies like how easy it is to access files.

Personally I don't bother with full disk encryption (FDE) since I don't really have anything private on my main computer. Just a bunch of game files, comics, movies, etc. Anything extremely important such as tax documents, personal data, etc. is honestly very small and I keep in a little Proton Drive folder, <1GB total. I think the best approach is to simply educate yourself and be aware of what's worth protecting and how best to protect that. Just enabling FDE and thinking you're safe ignores all the other avenues that personal data can be stolen.

My current pet conspiracy theory is that FDE with BitLocker isn't even worth it on Windows due to the TPM requirement. Why is that a bad thing? Your system probably has fTPM supported by the BIOS, why not just enable that?

techcommunity.microsoft.com/bl…

Integrating with features like Secure Boot and Windows Hello for Business, TPM 2.0 enhances security by ensuring that only verified software is executed and protecting confidential details.

ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5…
(I don't believe we'll see this EXACT implementation of DRM, I'm just providing an example of TPM being used for DRM and that these ideas have been in consideration since at least 2009).

Now, if I were Microsoft and I wanted to exert an excessive amount of control over your system by making sure you couldn't run any inauthentic or "pirated" software to bring it more inline with the walled garden Apple approach they've been salivating over for the past decade+, you'd first need to ensure you had a good baseline enabled. You know, kind of like the thing you'd do by forcing everyone into an OS upgrade and trashing a lot of old hardware.

It won't be instantaneous, I don't know exactly how or what it's going to look like when they start tightening their grip. Again, this is all speculation, but it's not hard to connect the dots and their behavior over the past couple years does not give them the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is no longer a company that can be assumed to be acting in the best interest of the average consumer, they're not doing this for your security. They want to know that your computer is a "trusted platform".

TPM 2.0 – a necessity for a secure and future-proof Windows 11

With Windows 10 end of support approaching, it’s important to revisit a key minimum system requirement for Windows 11: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0.

^{Steven_Hosking (TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM)}

I'm sure there are people aware but for the laymen this is such a massive vulnerability.

This is only a vulnerability if you suspect a threat actor might physically access your computer. For most people, this is not a concern. There's also the issue that it has processing overhead, so it might make certain operations feel sluggish.

Encryption is not a panacea, because if someone ever forgets their password (something common for the layperson), the data on that drive is inaccessible. No chance for recovery. Certain types of software may not like it either. It's one of many considerations someone should make when determining their own threat model, but this is not a security flaw. It's an option for consideration, and most people are probably better off from a useability standpoint with encryption disabled by default.

I think it just really goes to show you can't hide anything on a computer physically.

I also feel this is something that should be taught in school (maybe it is i finished school over 13 years ago)

I always knew there were ways to recover files off of hard drives. I just assumed they needed to be physically remounted not just plug in a usb and off you go