IIUC it wouldn’t be able to be automatically started then, right? I mean I guess you could drag it to startup but it would need the password to start. From a security minded perspective that’s good, but from a user perspective kind of sucks.

that's true, but since this is a record of everything you've ever done, i feel this is the irreducible minimum for security. a separate password prompt would signal to the less technically-minded users that this is Serious

Always forced to foreground makes it even less convenient and kind of odd.

this is a design pattern i borrowed from Linux (my OS of choice). modern Linux apps require your explicit permission to run in the background, so most of them don't even bother with running in the background at all. that said, i suppose it can run in the background, as long as the status indicator is sufficiently noticeable, but you'd have to go into the settings and flip that switch yourself

I don’t see this functionality as being useful if you have to remember to turn it on.

i imagine that it would become a habit, or you'd set it to run on startup. my use case would be turning it on for specific tasks like research or shopping, where you might only later remember that that one thing you saw was actually really valuable

I figure the cryptfs could be a bitlocker volume with a different key than the base C drives key to get similar protection. In theory it could also be based on the C drives bitlocker for a less secure, but still hardware level secured middle ground.

can a user-installed app do that?