A lot of outrage for something that many other websites are also doing, and an acknowledged behavior by any of the major companies running social networks with

A lot of outrage for something that many other websites are also doing, and an acknowledged behavior by any of the major companies running social networks with social widgets - i.e. Google, Facebook, etc. Heck, Google recently got in trouble because they were using a fairly standard technique that got around the third-party cookie blocking in Safari, and Facebook had to admit that they are able to track users who are logged out, presumably by comparing IP addresses of those who load the widgets against IP addresses of users when they are logged in.