google reserves that for itself so as not to lose it's dominance of online advertising and targeting. why would they share their bread and butter with the little guys?
The scarier implication is they don't need GA to understand web trends. They can collect far more data using Chrome, AMP, Android, Ads, and more.
It does seem like Google is in a textbook case of dumping to prevent new competitors from arising though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea8GyscSFaQ.
It's more valuable to them to be able to truthfully say they don't add GA data to it. Meanwhile offering GA for free chokes out that competitive avenue to anyone else.
I'm also unclear on whether "opting out of tracking" under the definition you're implying is possible. Any entity tracking you needs to track that you've opted out of tracking, which requires tracking you. Whoops.
Imagine a system where you opt in to tracking, if you are not opted in, no data about you is written into any system used for business analysis.
Of course you can't/shouldn't stop all writes to your systems, like server access logs, but you can draw a line between operational and business data.
Of course if you have access to both operational and business data sets you can analyze data for people who have not opted in, but I would rather live in a world where we at least try to enforce a separation between the two.
0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
There are also ways to opt out of ad targeting but that's irrelevant to this discussion.
the massive organizational system itself, nevermind the massive computational systems, acts against doing this thoroughly and auditably.
it's also hard to believe that they'd get the data out of every last nook and cranny when they don't even swap out dead hard drives in their datacenters because of time and cost to find them (as related to me by a googler a number of years ago).
and they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists for anything that falls all the way through the cracks to the public in a way that allows lawsuits (gdpr and the like).
The army of lawyers look within too. The problem with big companies is usually that they lobby their way to do things that you don’t like. They are usually very good at working within those parameters.
That’s why you generally don’t see data breaches in places like Google. When you do, they are usually a combination of acute issues (hacking, etc) and incompetence (Equifax). There are overlapping controls and segmentation that make it harder to rogue stuff without oversight.
At a startup or small adtech place, forget it. The controls are not there and the company has nothing to lose.
There are plenty of examples where Google have not honoured such expectations of trust. They have not, to date, gotten into "a lot of trouble".
The GDPR is probably the piece of regulation most likely to possess teeth big enough to get Google into a little bit of trouble, and the task of enforcing that is down to 1 person in a deliberately underfunded department in the country where Google has chosen to locate it's EU HQ[0]
There is no will to prosecute Google for misbehaviour in this area.
- [0] https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/over-6700...
Actually, GA does have a creepy feature that lets you spy on individual users. It's called the User Explorer report (under Audience in the left-hand nav). It lets you page through each hit from a particular user. This is also the report that lets you process Data Subject Access or Deletion requests under GDPR or CCPA.