Big Tech Companies Plan Even More User Tracking

Will it end up in NSA hands?

Thanks to former NSA man Edward Snowden, we now know a fair amount about the NSA's ability to collect data about what people do online, and it's all rather disturbing.

But the future looks even more worrisome. Some of the biggest companies in tech are assembling new forms of online tracking that would follow users more aggressively than the open technologies used today. Just this week, word arrived that Microsoft is developing such a system, following, apparently, in the footsteps of Google.

The new data troves are to be used for advertising, not government surveillance, and only made available to authorized third parties. Yet the NSA has proven adept at co-opting large pools of data for its own ends.