There was a time where your site would be
site.com/product.php?id=x or
site.com/product.asp?id=x,
now it's:
site.com/keyword-keyword/keyword/keyword/product-name?urchin or google analytics crud
site.com/dashboard/alerts
We should get back to that. There need to be better ways to do SEO than polluting URLs. Slapping this information on a URL is a misuse of the purpose of URLs (permanent locators for a resource on the web. E.g. even if the resource has moved, there is a response code and a way of reaching the new location).
Example: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
All the parameters you see specify campaign variables to help marketers track their campaigns. As for privacy, these parameters don't reveal user behavior on a site. It's only when it's connected to Google Analytics that is placed ON the site that the campaign data is then connected to site data. Long URLs have no adverse affect on the user browsing experience and URL shorteners do a great job of hiding them so removing those parameters simply serves to screw over marketing people that have spent time and money crafting their campaigns and gathering valuable data.
In regards to making it harder to detect duplicate URLs...really??? It's that hard to strip our everything before parameters?