How can I make my Home directory invisible to others?

I have two accounts on my system and my Home Directory can be accessed from the other account via Storage Media - User Accounts. Is there a way to remove User Accounts from Storage Media? Better yet is there a way to fix it that users only see their own Home and no other?

Hi Johngoodin,

You can do one thing change your username like this

usermod -l .johngoodin johngoodin

This will make your home directory invisible..

AIUI this only changes the user name, not the home directory name. Changing the home directory name to /home/.johngoodin would not make it invisible, it would only make it hidden and users can easily see hidden directories. AFAIK, the only way to make a a user's home directory invisible to other users is to put it inside another directory that only the user has read and execute permissions for. Other users could still see that directory but they could not seethe home directory inside it.

Think I got the solution.

I opened my Home in Konqueror and right clicked Home in the folder pane.
Then clicked Properties - Permissions

And set Group & Others to Forbidden. It's my understanding now only I or a Root Shell in Terminal can read or write to it.

That sounds right. Here is another way to do this using the shell. When you list a directory's contents --

-- part of the listing for each directory entry looks like this:

rwxr-xr-x

Or something similar. Now enter this:

You will see a list of each user's directory, accompanied by the "permissions" as above. The permissions field is broken up into three subfields for (u)ser, (g)roup and (o)thers:

uuugggooo
rwxr-xr-x

The user permissions are for the the owner of the account. The group permissions for for any member of the same group as the user. "Other" permissions are for anyone else.

So, to protect your home directory from prying eyes, it is not enough to deny access to "other" but to "group" also. Like this:

Translated, this means "deny read, write, and explore access to any members of the group I belong to and all others."

The directory listing you want for maximum privacy (from all but root) is this:

username rwx------

One more detail. For a file, the "x" permission grants the right to execute it. For a directory, the "x" permission grants the right to explore it.

As per catkin
http://linux.die.net/man/8/usermod
(my exclamation mark)

Put your confidential directories or your whole home directory on a drive or partition that is not mounted by default (you then need to make your entry in the /home directory a softlink to the real location, whether it's mounted or not). That way you absolutely lock out people, except those who have mount permissions.