Recently, Twitter admitted to “harvesting” smartphone contacts and storing the information on its servers — mostly without customers’ knowledge. Access to the contact list is activated when users click the “Find Friends” feature on smartphone apps.

The practice became public when an app developer in Singapore noticed his contacts had been copied from his iPhone contacts list without his consent by a social network called Path. Since this news has been broken, Twitter has said it will update its privacy policy to be more explicit.

So just to play devil’s advocate, if someone hadn’t noticed this issue and made it public, would social networks have continued to practically steal private information without informing customers?

This piece of news made us think about how the idea of privacy has completely changed. Technology has changed an entire generation, and you can find any information about pretty much everyone by Facebook-stalking them — which is harmless in most cases — or following them on Twitter.

Despite the fact that our generation has become accustomed to displaying our entire lives via different social network websites, we still expect — and should receive — an ounce of privacy at least. Our information shouldn’t be secretly shared and then stored in places that we are unaware of.

We should be given the option of whether we want to share information that we believe to be otherwise private and available to only us. Otherwise it’s an invasion of privacy.

The above editorial is the consensus opinion of the Daily Kent Stater editorial board.