Free access to protected member

Question

I create a class, that has a few protected members, that are completely accessible to other classes:

class MyClass {
    protected String name;
}

In my opinion, this shouldn't compile:

MyClass mc = new MyClass();
mc.name = "foo";

but it works fine. When I make the member private, it works as expected. How could this be?

A few notes, but they shouldn't make any difference I think:

• the mc is inside a HashMap,
• I access it inside an Activity

Answer 1

protected members are accessible in subclasses(in same or different package) and all the classes in the same package. If you move that code to a different package, you would get the expected behaviour.

See Access Control.

Answer 2

The oracle docs are defining protected as followes:

The protected modifier specifies that the member can only be accessed within its own package (as with package-private) and, in addition, by a subclass of its class in another package.

See this Link

This means if you move your Class to another package you cannot acces the name.