bits blog:Â Â All of the outrage over privacy on the Internet is nothing compared to what may be coming. For years, Web companies have been trying to gather shreds of information about users in order to show them ads for things they are most likely to buy. These schemes have been accelerated over the last year, as the big Web companies like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have been trying to combine information they gather on their own sites with data about users gathered from networks that place ads on other sites.