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The design of the internet of everything, and the nature of the cloud that it floats in, is to track data. The 34 billion internet-enabled devices we expect to add to the cloud in the next five years are built to stream data. And the cloud is built to keep the data. Anything touching this cloud that is able to be tracked will be tracked.

Recently, with the help of researcher Camille Hartsell, I rounded up all the devices and systems in the U.S. that routinely track us. The key word is "routinely." I am leaving off this list the nonroutine tracking performed illegally by hackers, criminals, and cyberarmies. I also skip over the capabilities of the governmental agencies to track specific targets when and how they want to. (Governments' ability to track is proportional to their budgets.)

This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each example has been sourced officially or from a major publication.

It is shockingly easy to imagine what power would accrue to any agency that could integrate all these streams. The fear of Big Brother stems directly from how technically easy it would be to stitch these together. At the moment, however, most of these streams are independent. Their bits are not integrated and correlated.

A few strands may be coupled (credit cards and media usage, say), but by and large there is not a massive Big Brother-ish aggregate stream. Because they are slow, governments lag far behind what they could do technically. (Their own security is irresponsibly lax and decades behind the times.)

Also, the U.S.government has not unified these streams because a thin wall of hard-won privacy laws holds them back. Few laws hold corporations back from integrating as much data as they can; therefore companies have become the proxy data gatherers for governments.

Data about customers is the new gold in business, so one thing is certain: Companies (and indirectly governments) will collect more of it.

The movie Minority Report, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, featured a not too distant future society that uses surveillance to arrest criminals before they commit a crime. Dick called that intervention "pre-crime" detection. I once thought Dick's idea of "pre-crime" to be utterly unrealistic. I don't anymore.

If you look at the above list of routine tracking today, it is not difficult to extrapolate another 50 years. All that was previously unmeasurable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable. We'll keep tracking ourselves, we'll keep tracking our friends, and our friends will track us.

Companies and governments will track us more. Fifty years from now ubiquitous tracking will be the norm.