( CNN ) -- I live my life in the open : I 'm easily googleable , emailable , and you can figure out from my Twitter and Instagram accounts what I 've been doing . For a while my phone number was posted publicly on my Facebook profile . I 'm aware that these sites and services are tracking me . I know they 're collecting my data , crunching it and selling it to advertisers , who in turn try to sell me things , and I am OK with this . It 's the cost of admission . These services help me stay connected with my friends and interact with strangers , and in turn I grant them permission to analyze my tweets and profile my Facebook interests for profit . The revelation that the government is snooping on our communications in the interest of national security is nothing new . This latest incident does n't come as a shocker . You might guess that I reacted with mild surprise followed by general indifference , because young people are already sharing everything anyway . Besides , privacy is dead , right ? Privacy is not dead . The phone snooping is on a different level than that of companies selling my data to advertisers . Such behavior is unsettling , and is perhaps a true threat to privacy . There are some in Silicon Valley who regard privacy as a relic of the past , something that falls off the back of the truck of progress as it rumbles into the future . It reminds me of sci-fi author Rudy Rucker 's novel , `` Postsingular , '' in which entrepreneurs unleash nanobots that virtually overnight blanket the earth and create an Internet-on-steroids instantly connecting everything on the planet , letting humans peer into any part of the world . The novel is a thought experiment on the obliteration of privacy , and Rucker imagines dumpster-diving as routine â€ ” everyone can peer into the trash can at McDonald 's and find discarded but perfectly edible griddle cakes . Crime basically disappears as everyone knows where everyone else is and what they are doing . Even clothing is a mere formality . But even in the book there are blind spots , places the nanobots ca n't reach . In our real world , privacy is n't anywhere close to dead . Privacy today is just more nuanced and exists in different ways than 10 , 50 , 100 years ago . It is not simply a matter of sharing more or less ; not merely how much but in what way and with whom . Privacy is contingent on who we 're trying to keep something private from -- family , friends , acquaintances , employers , strangers . With more services and apps and greater degrees of control in which we can use them , we find ourselves having to make more decisions about where to draw the lines . Friends of mine will untag themselves from Facebook photos to hide more unflattering images of themselves if they are `` friends '' with their employers . Some refrain from posting to Facebook things they do n't want their parents to see , opting for Twitter instead , where their parents do n't have accounts . Snapchat is built around a privacy-minded constraint : Mission Impossible-esque messages that self-destruct shortly after opening . The nature of social media also makes room for subterfuge , and an illusory openness is another form of privacy . The Internet allows for masks , false identities and misrepresentation . It 's prevalent enough in online dating , for instance , that MTV has a show devoted to it . There may be new spotlights illuminating our lives , but these lights also cast shadows , and these shadows become new places where we can hide ourselves from the world . The kind privacy that is becoming more of the norm is dependent on our ability to move freely among the myriad services and apps , and to opt in selectively , both in what we use and how we choose to use them . I 'm not about to disable all my accounts . But I do wonder if we 're heading into a future where we have to be constantly mindful of when our privacy might just slip through the cracks . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jack Cheng .
Jack Cheng : I live my life in the open , I 'm OK with websites and services tracking me . Cheng : The revelation that the government has been snooping on calls is not a shocker . He says while young people share everything , privacy is not dead ; it 's different . Cheng : Privacy is contingent on what services we choose to use and how we use them .