Are private methods really safe?

Question

In Java the private access modifier consider as safe since it is not visible outside of the class. Then outside world doesn\'t know about that method either.

Answer 1

The question is who are you trying to save it from. In my opinion, such a client of your code is the one at a loss here.

Any piece of code (written by you or others) which tries to access a private member of the above class is essentially digging its own grave. private members don't make a part of the public API and are subject to change without notice. If a client happens to consume one of such private members in the manner given above, it's going to break if it upgrades to a newer version of the API in which the private member got modified.