Davey Shafik has a post to his site with some of his thoughts about the "visibility debate" - essentially when the different method/property visibility types make the most sense.

A lot has been said about when to use public/private/protected. Some say that you should never use private, while others say you should never use protected.

About the only thing that people can seem to agree on is that public should be used with caution. That your versioning should be based around your public API, and you have a responsibility to maintain that API. The issue is mainly around the maintenance responsibility of protected vs private. Given that other developers can depend upon protected, it can effectively be considered to have the same overhead as your public API.

He shares some of his own reasoning behind how he uses the different levels in his own code. He touches on each of the different levels, sharing when and how he thinks it should be used to keep a well-structured, consistent API for your library or application.