My whole employment history (in modern parlance) can be described by abbreviation 'IT'. Not an insignificant part of it involved implementation of information security ('IS') measures. And the first IS principle is to balance expenses for threat defence against a threat severity and probability.
That is why I personally do not comprehend why a home/private user may want to use his directory encryption, except for being mislead by promises of being 'secure'.
Contra:
- encrypted directory significantly cripples an ability to recover data in case of drive and/or filesystem corruption;
- OS updates may lead to failures in accessing encrypted data;
- migration to a new computer/hard drive takes extra effort;
- encrypted personal directory is decrypted when a user logs in; therefore, any troyan and/or attacker who hijacks the user's session accesses unencrypted data;
- encrypted directory can not be scanned for malware offline;
- the risk of forgetting passphrase is real;
- the mere fact that a corporate user creates encrypted personal directory is an alarm for corporate IS staff.
Pro:
- a thief can not access encrypted data on the stolen computer;
- another user/account (w/o superuser privileges?) can not access encrypted data;
- you really have something as important as to be hidden that much.
Balance: Do pros outweigh contras?
My personal opinion is that home directory encryption is advertised too much and is falsely perceived as an ultimately efficient security measure.