Right, which is why GA is not allowed to load in my browsers. This is a different avenue for disclosure of a similar bundle of info.

Just curious: Are you okay if it's something self-hosted (like Piwik) doing the same kind of tracking?

In other words: Do you not want a third party (like Google) to have that data or the second party (web administrators)?

IMHO I think they are different. So much of what makes the web and surveillance creepy is the ability to correlate across data sources. CCTV isn't creepy for one store owner to have - it's bad when the government has it everywhere.

It's not bad for people to analyze how users interact with their site. It's bad when one entity (or a handful) can track you across the Internet.

So in other words, I don't mind Piwik and have considered sending in a patch to uBlock and others with a switch to disabled "locally hosted analytics" or something similar. Like the drive to push "ethical advertising", I think it's reasonable to permit some benign tracking as a way to coerce more sites into decentralizing user analytics.

I'm fine with with self-hosted analytics, and use a log analyzer myself.

My primary objection is automated profile-generation and identifier sharing - third parties don't need realtime updates on my reading habits. I like to think folks who run their own analytics aren't sharing identifiers with adtech shops, but of course can't know.

GA is present on 46% of web traffic [1] or 65% of top web pages [2], so you could be justified to claim the majority...

[1]: https://whotracks.me/trackers/google_analytics.html [2]: http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site...