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[Commentary] As the Internet of Things steamrolls from tech novelty to entrenched reality, privacy concerns will mushroom surrounding the personal data generated by devices on our bodies and in our homes.

And now, it seems, is a critical inflection point, according to those gathered at the Internet of Things Privacy Summit, the first such Silicon Valley confab organized by data privacy management company TRUSTe.

The cynical view is that corporations focused on profit will minimize privacy issues if they get in the way of a growing bottom line. But Michelle Dennedy, chief privacy officer at security software firm McAfee, and others caution that approach risks a consumer backlash.

"In almost any segment it's a very competitive market out there, consumers have a lot of choices," she says.

Ultimately, the privacy debate boils down to "whether we as consumers are willing to surrender privacy for convenience, which is dangerous considering the tempting opportunity for the abuse of such private information," says Jana Anderson of The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University.

There seemed to be two conclusions from the day's events in Silicon Valley. One, the Internet of Things is coming, and with it a growing need for consumers and corporations alike to address its attendant privacy issues. And two, worrying about our online privacy is nothing new.

[Commentary] Each time news flares of Facebook or other Web-based entities caught mining or manipulating user data -- as it did recently with the revelation that Facebook in 2012 tweaked user news feeds to gauge emotional reactions -- Internet privacy activists and consumers alike react in outrage. And each time, outrage soon gives way to business as usual.

Is it time to accept the fact that the price of living in our socially connected, high-tech age is forking over our right to do so anonymously? The glaring reality is yes.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product," says Adi Kamdar, activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has monitored privacy issues from the Web's earliest days. The price of admission isn't cash but personal data.

"What we learned from the Facebook incident was simply that your online experience is highly curated from a profit-motivated point of view," says Kamdar of the social network's experiment, in which 670,000 users were fed both negative and positive posts (shocking result: the former made them sad and vice versa). "I hope it teaches people not to put all their eggs in one online basket."