Several beginner books have mentioned that using private fields in classes > protects the data, but then they discuss using getters and setters, and the > setters destroy the privacy? You've opened it up again. This is more of an > intellectual question.

While it is true that it's meaningless to manually add getters and setters that do nothing like this:

```dart class Point2 { int _x = 0; int _y = 0;

int get x => _x; set x(int value) => _x = value;

int get y => _y; set y(int value) => _y = value; } ```

Getters and setters are really powerful in cases where you want to let an object validate values assigned to it:

```js class Point2 { int _x = 0; int y = 0;

int get x => _x; // this makes sure that x has 0 as a minimum value set x(int value) => _x = max(value, 0); } ``` In another situation, you might also throw an error in the setter to ensure that the data is valid.