The author claims that for one-time visitors you're not supposed to have any 3rd-party tracking code but uses Google Analytics which Ghostery counts as a tracking code. How's that going to work out for practically every site in the world?
You just do what google does and ask for consent before providing access to the site. The user doesn’t need to log in to consent. Once consented, the site can set a cookie. Then that user becomes part of your “Full interaction users” bucket.
As long as you have a valid reason to collect the data for the benefit of the user experience, you can make that a requirement to use the site.
Requiring every website to create graphs and stats from log files is not practical, especially with websites that don't have a constant developer on it. Think blogs, recipe websites, restaurants. Google Analytics provides an insanely good value for them and it's a good thing.
It's not like pre Google Analytics we had a golden age of website stats.
It's not like your webmaster is load-balancing your cluster using Google Analytics feed. Let webmasters use tools for webmasters, and get rid of the marketing crap.
Essentially, it enables you as a small business to determine where you should be focusing what's probably a very limited budget in order to connect with audiences who are actually interested in your product/service. There's no exploitation or sale of data or misuse of private info involved.