> There is some kind of dispute about privacy, with commercial companies wanting to collect as much data as possible and some people opposing to it. Is not your project picking the wrong side here?

As we're not providing information to any commercial company or selling it I don't think this is a reasonable comparison. If we were collecting information to sell and raise funds for the project I'd object to that, too.

I'm not sure it would be as contentious if you were running your own analytics software. But some more privacy-aware users (myself included) have serious reservations about Google's increasingly pervasive data collection.

The fact that Homebrew uses Google Analytics means that it provides Google with more data, even if you don't hand that data over to other companies after the fact.

We've tried extremely hard to ensure that Google cannot tie this information to other information. It uses a randomly generated UUID that you can change at any time and we request IPs be anonymised using the documented method (and I see no evidence that Google lies about this). When there's an alternative that is provided to us for free, can handle our load and stores similar or less personal information to Google Analytics we'll consider it. So far there's been a few offers of help but none of them have met those requirements.

Do you guys have a general concept of monthly cost for e.g. DigitalOcean or similar, just to handle the hosting and bandwidth for a Piwik backend or something similarly not Google? At your scale I'm sure it is well beyond anything I could afford to subsidize given my present responsibilities, but this might possibly be an easier conversation to have in general were it more widely known what kind of costs we're talking about here - I get the impression that part of the GA-related upset may just have to do with the fact that people don't really understand the magnitude of the problem under discussion. (Or I hope so, anyway.)

Google's business is tying information to other information in ways people don't expect, so your "trying very hard" seems likely to fail. Plus, it seems like you're not trying very hard:

> It uses a randomly generated UUID that you can change at any time and we request IPs be anonymised using the documented method...

You already have a UUID. Why give Google the IP at all? Of course, I don't understand your desperate need for "analytics" unless it's a need for approval. Why can't you take all the blog posts talking about "brew" as approval enough?