Because of the pandemic, I go to stores wearing a mask. That might prevent me being identified by the cameras (IDK), but the cashiers still sell to me.
The standard web analytics tools of the late 90s basically parsed the http log. Even those will give you info equivalent to "looking through cameras".
You might want GA, you might even need it, but you're absolutely not blind without it unless you choose to be so.
OP saying that "I am not a data cow" is just missing the point. GA is logging when you visit the website, some interactions like clicking a link, and generally not much more than that. It is not indexing your hard drive or downloading your photos.
Good.
> If you were actually in a physical store then they could look at you through the cameras.
That's a gross idea to have.
And they'd be absolutely blind without GA. There's no magic window into customer behavior. If you were actually in a physical store then they could look at you through the cameras. This way they can know if there are basic problems with the store.
With a website, they would have absolutely zero way to know what your experience of shopping there is like without a tool like GA. The only data they would have at all is sales numbers. The experience of shopping online would be immeasurably worse without it.