The problem is with the centralisation and aggregation of that knowledge. It’s not (necessarily) bad that the site owner knows you’ve visited their site, it’s bad that Google knows all of the sites you’ve visited.

That's a fair point.

While I am not as concerned about big tech's data siloing as some, I can see why it's worrying.

Unfortunately, not only is GA the best totally free analytics solution that any marketeer will know how to use, many ad blockers nuke ALL analytics scripts, even if they have nothing to do with google.

> many ad blockers nuke ALL analytics scripts, even if they have nothing to do with google

That's because you don't need analytics scripts to see if people visiit your site - you have the original page request for that. Analytics script collect additional information beyond that, which users that block them have deemed to be not acceptable.

Less about stopping analytics and more about stopping privacy-malicious analytics (which google analytics could arguably be defined as). Install a privacy friendly analytics package and I suspect it won’t be much blocked.

That'd be a reasonable counter-point if extensions like uBlock Origin weren't also blocking self-hosted analytics packages, like Matomo.

I think people in general have gotten so sick of ad powered big tech they are having a bit of an over-reaction against analytics in general, not just google's product.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I would not expect a restaurant owner to track where I come from, my demographics etc?

Restaurant owners do exactly that - just by looking at you sitting in there (and other customers).

not my underwear colour, type, size. What they see is what I offer to show

They wouldn’t have to “track” it scientifically in a database.

They would just know implicitly by observing their customers who are right in front of their eyes. (At least pre-covid)

would they know which car I drive from looking at me?

> These are all the things a restourant owner would know about their customers, for example

The restaurant I visit most often "knows" only my first name (only) plus my mobile phone number, I suppose if they really tried they could probably collect data on my approximate height, build, eye and hair colour, and that I have multiple kids. That's it (since I pay them in cash).

Oddly enough they don't worrying about tracking their customers and instead focus on delivering an excellent product with excellent service. They're known in the region for that, they're usually busy, so one might think their strategy seems to be working(?)

They also know when you like to visit, what you like to order, how long you stay, who are you with...

All together, that's more data than a Google Analytics user knows about any of their visitors.

You could do all that without involving the world's largest advertising corporation. Use the data you already receive with each request. You know, count how many pages you've served, use a GeoIP database on visitors' IP addresses, parse their user agents, all that kind of stuff.

A lot of relevant interactions in modern apps are client based. You'd have to send those data points via ajax, but then you've just recreated google analytics.

Also, feels like a bit of an arbitrary boundary.

They know I visited the page by their servers serving me the page. Why the hell does Google need to be involved for that?

And why should a random page I visit get to know my demography, interests and where I come from? How can you portray avoiding that as taking privacy too far??

I don't care if that makes it harder to optimize your business. Find another way or perish.

But these are all things that real world business can learn as well about you, more or less.

You don't have a problem with them knowing that.

How do the real life businesses know that? If I explicitly tell them, that's fine. If they know it through some nefarious collection I would have a problem with that.

Would it be reasonable for a restaurant to know about every other restaurant you visit? And every store you look at, and every newspaper article you read?

As a user of google analytics, I don't know any of that.

But you do! There’s a ‘Interests’ profile of your visitors in the stats, which is based on what they do on other sites.

Of course in any case Google knows and they choose how much they want to tell you.

Fair point. I am not a heavy GA user, I just use the basic functionality.

Nevertheless, I don't feel iffy about my Interests profile participating in aggregate data available to the sites I visit. Since virtually all sites are free of charge, giving some of that insight back seems like a fair trade.

That said, having ALL that data available to Google without anonymization is a bit more worrying, although I haven't seen many examples where it hurt someone in real world.

JS analytics gives away too much.

Web site owners can analyze their web server's log, which has at least client's IP address, user agent, timestamp and the URL. Already too much if you ask me.

I’m mostly interested in what moves like this will mean for e-commerce. Not the sites themself, but all the shady and honestly unprofessionel retargetting, ad-agencies and online marketing in general. Most of those business rely on questionable JavaScript based tracking. I don’t see the majority of those business have the resources or knowledge to survive without JavaScript tracking.

Most of those things are easily analysed in-house or with much less invasive solutions than GA.

> general demographic of their audience

This is not useful to improve a product unless combined with proper research into the demo, which most people don't do. They just apply their own biases and make their product _worse_.

So many people are making all their decisions based on shallow data like this and never do a simple usability test that yields massively more impact.

Put differently, people use this data to try to focus in on specific traits of their audience before even testing that their software works for "humans".

You can, as the owner of a site, check that someone has visited your site, but you cannot give that information to Google (without consent). That's illegal under the GDPR.

Also, you have zero control of what code any client executes on their machine. Zero say, whatsoever.

> That's illegal under the GDPR [..]

So what about sites that claim that certain cookies are necessary for operation of the site, when that's at best bending the truth and at worst an outright falsehood?

Many sites work perfectly well and - amusingly - become blazingly fast once you block all scripting and cookies. No annoying GDPR notices, no annoying ads, no (client-side) tracking. So much for "necessary" cookies :/

You can still self-host your web analytics and they won't be blocked, plus it's 100x better than using a "free" service that centralizes data.

I am not deep into analytics space, but I know from experience that the most popular ad blocker (ublock origin) will block the most popular self hosted analytics package (matomo).

The thing about blocking self-hosted analytics is that it's very easy to avoid being blocked if you want. You can just change the included tracker name, or request parameter names.

best to ask. Do you generally advertise your ethnicity/country when you go to a restaurant?