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This critical review essay focuses on three areas that reflect the current dilemmas raised by ICTs in relation to privacy: the technical layer of network security, the content layer of misuse by third party and the social layer of intimacy boundaries. This layered typology takes into account the displacement of privacy issues from secrecy to anonymity and traceability as well as the move from a market-controlled view of privacy towards leverage by the end-users. It considers the various models for privacy regulation and self-regulation that are currently being debated in the United States. Finally, it interprets these models in the light of the US context specificity, where privacy is still considered as private property, while pressures from the end-users tend to promote a more democratic, distributed and generative option that could eventually mesh with European visions of privacy as dignity and self-empowerment.