What exactly do you mean by 'monitored'? Of course sites you visit on the internet know you visited them, just like shops you visit IRL know you visited them. But it's not anyone is actually monitoring you or any other user personally. The worst that happens is some algorithms change your ads.
The scary thing about web history logging is that it makes you question your web habits, if not become actively paranoid.
For instance, the article quotes the head of MI5 regarding preventing the bombing of the London Stock Exchange in 2010.
I wanted to know more about this, so Googled London Stock Exchange Bomb, and clicked on a few stories, and wanting to find out a bit more about the people involved, I then Googled their names and clicked on a few more links.
All this time, I had the thought at the back of my head: will these searches and clicks put me on a list somewhere?
It's this feeling that I most dislike about it all; something, or someone, somewhere may be watching, and so now I'm questioning myself because some discussion on some site has potentially questionable keywords in its URL.
It was a huge privacy hole: malicious pages could measure how long it took for URLs to load and use that to tell which other sites you had visited in the past.
It is clear when you're on a browser that your search terms and text inputs go to a server somewhere. And RMS has plenty of warnings about such things as Google Instant, Facebook "likes" and other sneaky ways websites spy on you.
But at least up until now you could stay away from that stuff by just not opening a browser, and you knew to be careful when you did. Now there is no line, just "be careful what you type on a computer, period. You don't know who's watching". And that's a lot worse. What if your private journal on your hard drive is mined for targeted advertising? No, keep the web and my desktop separate, that's the point.
The intent doesn't matter. It's still reporting essentially your browsing history to them. Especially bad because the cheaters have caught on almost immediately (even worse that its the only reason its come to light that it is happening).
Keep in mind search engines often know what link you click on, and NSA probably also monitors which site is subsequently visited pursuant to a keyword search.
Tangent: I once stopped logging visits on a website of mine because the actual metric I care about is the user interaction through comments (and using certain features on my site). I can highly recommend this if the anonymous visits to a site actually really don't matter to you.
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