Just because I say it is not private does not allow you to broadcast it.

The digital world is binary in terms of 1's and 0's but a collection of data is never binary. (yes there are a few exceptions)

We like choices to be black and white but we survive in a world defined by shades of grey. (yes some choices are black and white but very few)

We love the elegance of simplify but live in world full of complexity and chaos with every choice. (do we create complexity to avoid the truth!)

In the same way that Newton's theories provided order and Einstein originally rejected Heizenberg's ideas of quantum/ chaos as the evolution of Newton's laws and wanted to hold onto the simplicity of order, I would content that we have a the same problem in digital privacy…..

We like order but cannot deal with the consequences which are a lack of choice.  The perfect storm here is private and public defined as "if you say it is private then is it, if you don't it is then it is not"  or "you have said it is public so it is"  but why does that allow you to assume that all non-private is non private... because that is what the law says.

Google+ up'd the game in 2011 with circles enabling you more control over who you communicate what with; a system much closer to real life, but the issue we are facing is going to be LAW and REGULATION which will continue to change at a snails pace to hold onto the original order (simplicity, black and white) and not provide a framework to deal with chaos and complexity.  Whilst there will be some binary boundary at the edge: legal and illegal, everything else we do will increasingly fall into grey areas, true life.

I wrote a blog a while ago (May 2010) titled Would Aristotle use Facebook? and looked at private as sitting between two extremes of public.  One extreme was broadcast public and the other internet public.   I could have chosen the other model where public sits between two extremes of private.  One extreme is private for those friends only in that circle and the other is private but within all my circles.  This model perhaps better aligns to what users mean when they mean private, it is the choice. So maybe the problem of dealing with choice and chaos for the user is about the UI and UX…… but the setting still causes problems for the business models and that dilemma is not going away.