Yes, definitely. I mention it in Guard's own privacy policy, I don't like using it either, but reasons are: (a) it's the simplest and as far as I know one of the few free analytics tools available, (b) not having a measure of the website activity will make me effectively blind and unable to make decisions, (c) I don't send any personally identifiable event (and, for this matter, I don't send any events apart from page loaded events). I'm also open to suggestions to replace GA.

You could just not use user-level analytics; I run the infrastructure for PrivacySpy.org, and using CloudFlare's aggregate analytics has served us perfectly well.

Have you considered hosting your own Matomo server? You could just scrape logs or use a Javascript tracker. But the data will stay local to you.

+1 for Matomo, it's a no brainer for any 'privacy service' to stay far away from Google Analytics.

I’m on mobile, so I can’t check if you’re already using this technique, but you could always use the anonimize IP function. This way the last 3 numbers of the IP data will not be send through the Google Analytics script. More info: https://www.jeffalytics.com/gdpr-ip-addresses-google-analyti...