The solution is to store the documents using a secret code. If a criminal breaks our lock, they won’t be able to make sense of them.

Technology lets us do this easily, using something called encryption.

Encryption scrambles (or “encrypts”) data. Without the right password, nobody can read it – not you, not a thief, and not the people who made the device.

If a device just asks for a password to log in, a thief might be able to bypass this to get the data inside.

If we encrypt our devices with a password, however, there probably isn’t a thief in the world who could read the data without it.