This is an interesting discussion (and naturally, I haven't yet read the article :-)

I agree with @mmn that the public and private stuff need to be in a completely separate forum/app. For me that's social networks like GNU Social in the one end, and then GPG email and OTR XMPP chat in the other.

But never the less, I sometimes feel I need something in between those as well. For example if I post something like "I hate my job" to my friends it isn't top secret information, but I would feel nice to know it wasn't going to be scanned and indexed by google the next day for my boss to read :-)

I'm not sure where this middle ground should be, though, and how it should be implemented. In one sense maybe you are just fooling yourself that there's such a thing in this age... Maybe it should be down at the pub with my friends (and hope nobody's phone is recording everything :-)

Cc: @rozzin @bobjonkman