Possible Duplicate:
Why can other users see the files in my home folder?
I need help with some basic permissions logic. I noticed that default permissions for a home folder are drwxr-xr-x.
How does that make sense? Everyone has access to other people's home folders?
Yes, and in combination with the default umask that will give any local user read access to the bulk of any other users files. The exception being those individual directories/files which for one reason or another gets created with a more strict set of permissions.
That is probably not a desirable situation on a lot of a multi-user systems. Preferable you will then have your user-creation script, your configuration management or whatever set more restrictive home directory permissions.
