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.
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.
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.
