I've got the 'show social network stuff' unticked in settings and the buttons don't display, but every page load is trying to contact those sites (and being blocked by ghostery). This may well be by design but I thought I'd let you know.

Ghostery is awesome. It knocks 400KB off a Cracked.com article, for instance.

Really shouldn't be necessary though. It bemuses me that people willingly put this spyware on their sites.

To be honest I mostly just use it to make pages load much quicker on my sometimes-crap connection, especially since some of the time the browser'll stop downloading actual relevant stuff while it waits for one of those social media things to respond.

He said screw you.

They're just being social Andrew, and networking like socialable folks do. Some of them even go outside, to meet with other people and socialise with them. In a networking styleeee.