\*nix home dirs aren't really "private". They usually default to world-readable, and in a university environment (at least one like mine) there was a culture where people expected friends to look at them.
> world readable ... there was a culture where people expected friends to look at them
Same here. The default user home from /etc/skel (or some equivalent) had a user-access-only area that we were told to put sensitive work (individually marked projects where we were explicitly expected/told not to collaborate on) and other such into. We could protect other directories a little more too if needed, or even open up bits of that one to "group" or "other" (at our own risk) and there were specific groups setup for explicitly collaborative projects (these days I would do away with that and control such collaboration through git or its ilk).
