I believe we are being tracked right now all of the time while we are online.
A little anecdote about my personal experience.
First, a little background. I, am a woman who has no technical training or knowledge, but, within the past year, after seeing something on a discussion on FR, I switched to Firefox as my browser. Some months later, again due to a discussion on FR, I looked into (translation = asked the tech savvy husband if it was okay) downloading a Firefox application called “Collusion”, which lets you see who is tracking your web activity through web beacons, etc.
When I installed the app, I elected to have a sound uaccompany the hits that come up. This alert sounds like a camera shutter. Sometimes this sound goes crazy, depending on which kind of site I go to. But logging onto FR never brought me any of those sounds. I guess that’s because there is no advertising here.
Well, about two weeks before the election, I was having a devil of a time with pages loading here on FR, particularly when I was trying to post a response. It struck me that I was hearing that shutter sound, so, I finally started looking at the website info that pops up in the lower left of my screen. URLs were running through quite quickly, but one that I saw several times said “google-analytics”.
As I said, I am not a techie person, so maybe my suspicions are just hogwash, but I have been wondering ever since if someone was spying on us. And we all know that Google is pro-Obamugabe....
in one way you are correct. google-analytics does track your information here, but they are doing this at the request of freerepublic. if you view the source code for a page on fr (or have your tech savvy hubby show you), you will see the request to have google-analytics tracking included at the bottom of the code.
this is extremely common on websites, as the reports google provides from this data are very useful to the website operator. there are ways to block this (and other such tracking), if you are bothered by this behavior. it may slightly degrade and/or change how some sites work for you, though. ymmv.