Interesting, the 'especially from government employees' bit feels like a very US-centric reaction. In many other places in the world people just kinda trust their governments. I have no problem with any European government collecting analytics data.

I disagree, as always the US is just 10 years ahead (so it will come to us as well, just later) and there are numerous law initiatives that show to what extent your privacy and freedom of expression is a concern of politicians.

>I disagree, as always the US is just 10 years ahead

At the same time the US is 10 years behind. GDPR is far ahead of anything the US has. Gun control is 50+ years ahead and lets not try to count years in social security nets or healthcare for the non-rich (or health in itself for that matter). In average I'd say the US is behind the curve and falling further by the day, especially now China has become a semi-great soon to be superpower.

Any European government?

https://rsf.org/en/news/romania-tries-use-gdpr-force-journal...

Yeah it’s just analytics data. I trust every shady website I’ve ever visited with what I click on, why should a government service (provided by the government to me in the public good) be any different? What could they possibly get from that the census bureau doesn’t have? The tax authority?

Europe has a long and recent history of not being worthy of trust. Francoist Spain just ended in 1975. We had communist Europe fairly recently. The Nazis weren’t that long ago. We’ve had actual genocide in Europe within the past 30 years. It’s a mistake to “trust” any government beyond what can be immediately audited and verified. However to your point about analytics: that’s pretty benign unless those analytics are personally identifiable.

But it is a government website, the government employees would have access to the data regardless of using GA

Yeah and they can't cross reference it with which newspaper stories you read, for example, like google can, will and do then selling that information you did not agree to provide to google and google's customers.

Sure, I don't trust government bureaucracies either.

However, they can easily get lots of compromising data from their own servers. Both from standard web server logs, and from their own scripts and tools.

Once you involve third-party analytics, though, there's another party to worry about. And not just about what they do with the data, but also about how carefully they manage it. That's arguably a key thing in GDPR.