Are there effective protections against them? If not, I wonder why the EFF hasn't taken up the charge to fight them?
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
We have also participated in meetings and discussions on tracking protection and lobbied browser developers about it.
The Panopticlick research shows that it's potentially difficult to impossible to detect and prevent persistent cross-site tracking in the current web platform by technical means. Even if we fixed every cookie-like mechanism so that no site can set and query state except through official HTTP cookies and subject to the user's cookie preferences, the sites might still be able to recognize the browsers by querying other navigator (and OS and plugin) properties. Tor Browser has been able to do a great job on that issue -- but at the cost of disabling a lot of web platform features that sites might expect.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir...
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
Both of these tools are focused on cross-site ("third-party") tracking, rather than cross-session tracking by an individual site ("first-party"). Third-party tracking is technically easier to try to detect, and some people regard it as more intrusive.
As I mentioned upthread, EFF's own research on browser fingerprinting shows that it's hard to stop all user tracking (because your browser and OS and device might be different enough from others to be unique in a population in ways that could be observable by a remote site). Tor Browser is doing great work on this
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge...
and I think they've made concrete progress. (I think the Tor Browser developers might say that the privacy benefits of using their changes without Tor are unclear because you could also so easily be tracked by IP address. But it's possible that some of their changes will find their way into mainline Firefox, at least as options.)