Here’s how presidential campaigns track who you are and what you do

We visited the Web sites for current 2016 Presidential hopefuls using the Lightbeam extension on Firefox. The extension gathers and visualizes connections made by websites as you visit, including cookies that are stored and read. In every case, the campaign Web sites stored or read a cookie during the visit. In nearly every case, the sites stored or read a cookie placed by a marketing company -- often the same marketing company as one of the other campaigns. With the increasingly massive universe of web-capable devices, marketers are figuring out how to connect your phone to your browser to your television or whatever else.

"We're starting to approach this 'Minority Report' world," said Andrew Frank, research vice president at Gartner, Inc., referring to the Tom Cruise movie, "where you might be in a store and a display might show personalized messages because it can locate you. Those kinds of things are sort of the future of where a lot of this tracking is going." Or maybe you're driving past your polling place on Election Day, and Rick Santorum knows that you gave him money, so your phone pops up with an alert reminding you to vote. Or, better yet, maybe it will remind you when you're at the bank that you were thinking about donating. We're not there yet. But Presidential campaigns are very eager to know as much as they can about you.