Ten years ago, cell phones were a luxury used primarily for business calls.

Today, children have cell phones capable of navigating the Internet, holding gigabytes of music and reading full books.

We’re happy to see technology advancing, but believe we should be able to choose if our personal information remains private.

Facebook recently decided to create an online phonebook that aggregates mobile phone numbers of Facebook friends and those in your physical cell phone.

Without warning, personal cell phone numbers were made available to anyone with access to your page. There’s a difference between friending 800 people and wanting 800 people to have your cell phone number.

Another cellular invasion of privacy was announced Monday by AT&T Inc. It will use cell phones’ location-sensing technology to send customers ads and coupons based on location.

While this technology is can only pinpoint users to within a one-mile area and doesn’t use a physical address, we feel this treads too closely to physically tracking users.

Some users may find this a cool new feature, but we still have a problem with corporations handing out our personal information for financial gains.

We envision numerous unrequested interruptions during class, work and personal time alerting us about the best deals on Campus Corner. While everyone is interested in knowing about great deals, AT&T shouldn’t be allowed to send us the information without consent.

To prevent unsolicited notices, customers should be able to opt out of receiving information.

AT&T and Facebook should e-mail or send messages to all of its users whenever changes will be made.

We should be asked what information we want to provide and receive, not be forced to find where on our Facebook pages we need to go to remove our phone numbers or what number we need to call to stop receiving cell phone advertisements.

Facebook, and all entities that have our personal information, should ask us what information we wish to provide instead of assuming we would willingly share it.