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16 Oct, 2013

Internet giants plan to track users even more

While public unease with the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts continues to grow, there are new signs indicating that technology companies are also upgrading their efforts to track what you’re doing on the Internet.

According to a new report by Wired, companies like Microsoft and Google are developing increasingly sophisticated means of collecting consumer data online. The goal is to harvest the new data for advertising purposes, but, as noted in the article, there’s always concern that the NSA could gain access to and use the information for other purposes. NSA documents published by the Guardian already suggest that the agency could use ad data and cookies to help it find people who use the anonymous Tor browser.

“Users did not have much control in the cookie era,”Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, said to Wired.“But the problem is about to get much worse — tracking techniques will become more deeply embedded and a much smaller number of companies will control advertising data.”

Read the rest: Internet giants plan to track users even more.