If you want to do an operation on fooA, you don't mutate fooA. You call fooB = MyFunc(fooA) and use fooB.
The nice thing here is you can pass around pointers to fooA and never worry that anything is going to change it underneath you.
You don't need to protect private variables because your internal workings cannot be mutated. Other code can copy it but not disrupt it.