Which is why everyone uses it and we just sit back and accept the consequences. You can't be expected to be taken seriously if you simultaneously argue that other's shouldn't do something while yourself use it for precisely the same reasons everyone else does.
BTW, in a number of countries a large percentage of doctors smoke. It's a cultural thing: They pick up the habit during the stress of medical school. Would you suggest that a large percentage of doctors in those countries not inform patients that smoking is bad for them?
As a politician recently complained about: Purity tests are usually a bad idea.
It's fair to criticize. It's silly to reject their word/work because of it.
It's a lot more like if all doctors were telling each other they should wash their hands before surgery, but many of them don't really because the tap water is cold and kinda too far away and everybody is doing it and what's the harm really and at least I'm not actively sneezing into the wound, you know?
For more reasons why (some/small) compromises should be allowed and not considered completely against the core value, see religious extremism.
I don't even consider it a compromise, because literally no one arguing to use GA anyway seems to be able to present both sides of the scale considering the compromise.
In comparison here this company is giving out all their user's browsing data to a huge advertising company without the user's explicit consent.
Doesn't mean she can't clean my teeth and drill holes in my skull or whatever with high proficiency.
You don't get that from server logs.
Sound like you're not arguing against Matomo but arguing that you really in fact do want to share data with a third party to extract information that your users very much did not consent to.
It's terrifying what comes out of the wood works sometimes.
It's indicative of a lack of respect for their users.
> GA provides objectively superior data and they probably get a lot of value from it
That's certainly true. Also, that's orthogonal to the point. Being very valuable to website operators doesn't make its use any more acceptable to others.
It's not a compromise until you consider the value of both sides of the equation. Please do elaborate on that, with some details on the negative externalities of blindly sharing your tracking data with Google.
Otherwise your argument just became "superior data has got some value to me, which is more than none, so yeah I got mine".
It's not less of an all-or-nothing attitude if you fail to seriously consider the other side of the supposed compromise.
(at least for me) Considering the value of their service, GA on their marketing page seems like a very small compromise. If you don't like it you are free to block it - hell, they literally provide a service to do so.