I saw Joe Andrieu at the Personal Data 2.0 Workshop this past week and he just did a post about privacy that makes a very important point: “public” and “private” are not black and white. They are highly nuanced and dependent on context and choices that every individual makes.

So the only way we’ll get to online systems that respect privacy the same way people are able to in the offline world will be to make it extremely easy for people to make the same contextual choices about what is shared with whom and why — and to have the same degree of confidence that those wishes will be respected.

For more about this point, see the series of Connect.Me blog posts about the Principles of Personal and the Respect Trust Framework.