The meaning of Encapsulation, is to make sure that "sensitive" data is hidden from users. To achieve this, you must:
declare fields/variables as private provide public get and set methods, through properties, to access and update the value of a private field
Better control of class members (reduce the possibility of yourself (or others) to mess up the code) Fields can be made read-only (if you only use the get method), or write-only (if you only use the set method) Flexible: the programmer can change one part of the code without affecting other parts Increased security of data