Encapsulation and Private Attributes in Python

We’ve made great progress with creating users and posts, but now we face a crucial question:

A user’s password or a post’s likes count should not be freely accessible to others who interact with the system. Direct access to these kinds of data could lead to security risks or inconsistencies in how the data is used. For example, if anyone could modify a user’s password directly or change a post likes count, the integrity of the system could be compromised.

This brings us to encapsulation, a core principle in object-oriented programming that helps us manage and protect data within our objects. Encapsulation bundles the data and the methods that operate on it together while also restricting access to certain parts of the object’s internal state.