Modern technology's benefits have accelerated our migration to social networking and other online activities. However, the confluence of the online world and life offline is imperfect, immature, and incomplete. People's habits, customs, and relationships are going through profound changes that will have as-yet-unknown effects on them and society as a whole. Here, the author looks at how literature can help identify and characterize the human nature of privacy problems in the online world. Multidisciplinary approaches that align knowledge from social sciences and humanities with computer science are needed to tackle the problem of privacy in the digital world.