Apple: encrypted backup facility in Time Machine, please

Question

A couple I know have had Macs and their backup hard drives stolen.
The robbers now have access to all their data, including their customers' confidential records.
When I heard about this I immediately set my own computer to use a password after a brief sleep. But this is fairly useless when my backup drive contains all the same information - totally unprotected.
This is obviously a universal problem.
Would Apple please tweak Time Machine so it makes an encrypted backup each time, which can only be opened with a password? I'm sure this is not beyond the capability of Apple's clever programmers.

Answer 1

Backup is going to become a much more serious issue in the next year or two, as more people bring work machines home
In the next year or two? Where, pray tell, does that time frame come from? I hesitate to be rude and suggest it was pulled from a bodily orifice, but...
People have been bringing work machines home for decades. My first Mac was a Mac 128K, brought home from work by my dad in '84. Before that, he had an Epson laptop (with an LCD screen of 30 columns by 4 rows, smaller than the screen on my current calculator), which was, once again, brought home from work. Okay, yeah, my dad was a nuclear engineer, not an average Joe... but even the average Joe has been doing it for at least a decade at this point.
Backup has always been serious, regardless of what the data is. Securing of sensitive data has likewise always been serious. There is nothing going on today that changes this... you've just learned something new and it has changed your perception of the world, that's all.
I didn't know that admin passwords were so easy to bypass. That's a pity.
That's true regardless of the system you are using. Windows, Linux, Mac, whatever, doesn't matter. Encryption is the only sure way to keep your data safe, and even then today's best encryption is only safe based on current technology, and may be easily cracked in a decade or so.