I just read a news story from the NBC News website and at the end of the story I read the following:


WTF?? What does this mean? They identify which IP addresses read which news stories? WHY? Call me paranoid, but I do not like this!

Oh Monga, your naivety makes me chuckle.

Just about every single website on the internet tracks your usage. Every single one. Even bargainshare. The information is useful in many ways. It's useful for them to understand how well their site layout is working, which parts of the website are most popular, how often the ads on the page are being clicked, what other websites are linking to their content and effectively driving viewers to their pages, etc. And sometimes it's useful to you, such as Bargainshare tracking which threads you've read, so it can send you directly to the latest followup to a thread instead of the ones you've already read.

If you really, really don't want then tracking you, there are some steps you can take, especially if you use Firefox. You can turn off cookies. That's how most websites identify a single user (since IP addresses can change - work computer vs. home computer, dial-up connections, etc.). You can use an extension like NoScript to turn off javascript from certain websites that are made to explicitly track a website's usage (such as google-analytics.com, webtrends.com, visistat.com, etc.). But even after all of that, they still have your IP address. You could use an anonymous proxy to change the IP address that the final website sees, but that tends to be a slow way to browse the web.