The topic of privacy is facing a new challenge in the digital era according to Belad et al (2011). While the conventional definition of privacy can be simply defined as being left along, the concept of privacy is much more complex in the online environment. While the meaning of absolute control of your privacy in the online is nearly impossible, online users’ awareness of such inherent risk can cause negative effects against companies and users. Companies and third parties must continue to collect user information to learn about their constituencies and provide more relevant services of products for them. However, once users become too afraid of offering information, companies will likely lose the ability to craft better offerings while customers will lose the chance of finding more relevant products and services. Hence, companies must demonstrate the ability to protect users’ personal information from external intrusions and its motivation and intention to product and respect information. Overall, users will doddle between information privacy protection behavior and information-seeking behavior. People will always want to protect their privacy. Nevertheless, companies can ease such concern of users by offering worthy offerings and embedded trust.

In the same sense, Bodle (2011) also elaborate the concern of online privacy using Google’s privacy practices as an example. Given the popularities of Google’s lines of cloud base software, the user base is growing in a massive scale. However, the author argued that Google relies on loosely defined self-regulations placing the responsibility of managing privacy protection on the user with vaguely written privacy policies. Some examples suggested the overly excessive personal data collections by Google without clear indications of the intended purposes.  While the author’s criticism against Google and muddy definition of privacy in the era of mobile technology is completely understandable, I must say that Google is not solely existing public enemy, and it happens to be that the firm is doing superb job than other privacy-destroyer wannabes. It surely imposes critical challenges against online privacy in the mobile technology era, but I still believe that self-regulation and user responsibilities are the way to improve unfinished mobile technologies and gain more social acceptance of such technologies.

According to Ford (2011), once clearly separated, the boundary between public and private is becoming blurry and intermingled private and public domains than ever before in the age of internet and mobile technologies. Especially, the advent of social media and blog brought even fierce tensions between public and private domains because individual users’ narratives of personal lives are aired to public and such stream of personal data can be collected and used without consent of the users. On the other hand, it is interesting that the author pointed out such online mediums are where we start to see the less obscure boundary between private and public because users have the option to classify the audience of the messages. The author suggested that the divide between private and public was never really a clear-cut line. Rather, the special and personal the public/private distinction is best described as a continuum anchored with the private on end and the public on the other.

Nevertheless, Ford’s continuum model is not without criticism. According to Jurgenson and Rey (2012), her concept is still limited to dichotomous nature of private and public divide, so that it would be better off to understand the concept as dialectic, meaning that each concept implies the other. Besides, as the example of danah boyd’s example of social steganography, a public message in social media setting is not necessarily a public message. With consideration of audience group, it can be consider either public or private for certain groups with shared values. Their proposed dialectic framework was reputed by Ford, stating that the steganography was an example of meaning-management, rather than the demonstration of dialectic nature of the private and public divide.

The private and public divide is a complex issue. As the boundary becomes blurry and such process is accelerated by internet and mobile technologies, we will likely experience emergences of new norm and value systems in the context of new technology infused environment. Apparently, many people is still learning the consequences of broadcasting supposedly private message in public channels, such as social media, and they are shaping relevant manners and etiquettes. Users of this new domain are self-regulating and self-purifying the new system. Although some may not like it and believe that new bundles of legal regulations must be injected, I still believe that wisdom of crowd will dominate our new channel, and the conventional definition of privacy, being left alone, will be applicable with little bit of twist in social media styles.