What is difference between public/private and protected and default in Java?

Protected access modifiers allow the data members to be accessed by class, package, subclass (same package), subclass (different package). The difference between public and protected is that public can be accessed from outside class but protected cannot be accessed from outside class .1 Mar 2021

A class may be declared with the modifier public , in which case that class is visible to all classes everywhere. … 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.

Broadly speaking, public means everyone is allowed to access, private means that only members of the same class are allowed to access, and protected means that members of subclasses are also allowed .

Differences. First and important difference is the accessibility i.e. anything public is accessible to anywhere , anything private is only accessible in the class they are declared , anything protected is accessible outside the package but only to child classes and default is accessible only inside the package.