NSA spying could prove costly to Bay Area and other Internet businesses, experts say

The continuing revelations about NSA spying on sensitive data kept by Silicon Valley companies are feeding fears that Internet companies in this country -- many located in the San Francisco Bay Area -- could suffer billions of dollars in lost business.

Following disclosures earlier this year that the National Security Agency's Prism program had spied on Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo, an industry group put the potential cost at up to $35 billion a year by 2016, while an influential tech research firm estimated the damage at a staggering $180 billion a year. And since then, worries about the potential for lost business have stayed high amid the seemingly endless stream of news stories about other NSA snooping. Any economic fallout is likely to add to the growing tensions between Silicon Valley and the U.S. intelligence community, with major tech companies joining a growing chorus of critics who want to limit the NSA's extensive data-gathering. And lost revenue could hurt one of the country's most dynamic industries as it continues to recover fully from the Great Recession.