The home page includes the java widgets for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.
By hosting this it tracks every visitor to your homepage, and these folks are monitored, thus all your visitors are tracked.
You can include raw links, but running the java off their pages reports on your users.
you can use ghostery for firefox. helps a bit.
There are lots of ways for users to protect themselves from promiscuous hosting.
What would also be nice would be if there was some repercussions to those that are selling personal user data to governments without letting their users know. If some percentage of hosting sites (or at least those that claim to care about privacy) decided to stop providing the tracking information via the widgets to those companies, it might make some difference.
The widgets report on you whether or not you click on them, and whether or not you are using ghostery. They load from the Facebook (et al) servers when you hit the page, providing the IP and other data of the browser, as well as any cookies you have that they can taste.
The problem is that most of the hostmasters don't realize what they are doing when they include the widgets. For them it is just a shortcut to add a feature. The best fix is closer to the cause.
It starts with knowing....
The concern is not just about the NSA hacking us, but also about those that are hacking the NSA and looking at what they have. They are building this big target and it would be hubris to imagine that it will stay secure forever. (It isn't secure now, according to Snowden, at minimum he hacked it) It is not such good public policy from a cost/benefit perspective.