Throughout our lives, we engage in various activities, such as going to school, working, voting, taking care of our families, and visiting with friends. These activities are spatially and temporally bound: They happen in isolation from one another, in their own compartments, which often represent an essential safeguard, as in the case of voting.

In our digital lives, the situation is quite different: All of our activities typically happen on a single device. This causes us to worry about whether it's safe to click on a link or install an app, since being hacked imperils our entire digital existence.

Qubes eliminates this concern by allowing us to divide a device into many compartments, much as we divide a physical building into many rooms. Better yet, it allows us to create new compartments whenever we need them, and it gives us sophisticated tools for securely managing our activities and data across these compartments.