In Python, we cannot explicitly set an class attribute to private or public. We can access class attributes directly using the dot notation. For example: my_dog = Dog() my_dog._name = "Fido" print (my_dog._name) To discourage this, we use the underscore naming convention along with setters to change the attribute and getters to get the attribute. For example: my_dog Dog() my_dog.change_name("Fido") print (my_dog.get_name()) Why do we bother doing this? Why not simple directly access the attributes as shown in the first example?