There is a growing consensus regarding the emergence of privacy concerns as a major deterrent towards the widespread adoption of emerging technologies such as mobile healthcare, participatory sensing and other social network based applications. In this paper, we motivate the need for privacy awareness, present a taxonomy of the privacy problems, and the various existing solutions. We highlight the tension that exists between quality of service at the receiver and the privacy requirement at the source and present a linear program formalization to model the tradeoff between the two objectives. We further present the design and architecture of SensorSafe, a framework which allows privacy-aware sharing of sensory information.