Under fast development of Internet technology, several problems related to ethics have emerged in the modern society, among which the tension between surveillance and privacy is salient. This paper is a literature review of theoretical pieces, empirical researches and specific cases to understand the problems of such conflict and hence to provide research directions for future studies. In order to understand the dynamics behind this pair of conflicting concepts, examining the definitions of these two concepts under the historical and cultural backgrounds is necessary. Thus, this paper firstly presents different understandings of these two concepts from Western and Eastern perspectives to argue that in the digital era, when the West and East hemispheres merge in the Internet, different perceptions of these two concepts are the first problem of the conflict between surveillance and privacy.  Then, this paper turns to the detailed setting of organizational communication claiming that workplace is another scenario of these two conflicting concepts. Using the statistical reports from American Management Association, this paper argues that the conflict between surveillance and privacy is becoming even more intense in the age of Web 2.0. Combining relevant theoretical pieces about this topic, this paper indicats that in modern organizations, the problems could be interpreted into three aspects: (1) organizational surveillance needs to be reexamined, because surveillance in modern organization has changed from vertical to delayering, even horizontal|(2) the concept of personal privacy in the modern organizations needs to be reconsidered as well, because the boundary of the private and the public has been blurred|and （3) what kind of information organizations can obtain from employees' social media and to what extent organizations can use the information to deal with working issues are unclear as well.  At last, this paper examines relevant empirical studies and cases to understand the most current research trend of this topic. Based on the literature, this paper concludes that current research mostly focuses on descriptive data, but it does not echo with the aforementioned aspects of these two conflicting concepts. Following this logic, in the end, this paper suggests that the future research directions could be: (1) re-conceptualizing the definitions of surveillance and privacy in the Web 2.0 environment that can be accepted by both the East and the West|(2) setting up the boundary of privacy and surveillance in the organizational setting which can satisfy multiple stakeholders|(3) setting up some rules and norms even laws of protecting employees' ″privacy and organizations″ right of surveillance|and (4) developing some educational programs of surveillance and privacy in the modern society to help prevent employees and organizations from potential conflicts.