Keeping a reliable counter of meaningful interactions is hard without personal data to correlate unique users.
It's hard if visitor numbers would directly translate into revenue or similar. The trouble you're running in then is discerning organic hits from clickfarming.
If all you care about is when, where what content is popular on your website, there's a pretty simple method: Tally 200 and 304 responses. 200 tells you how many visits you get. 304 tells you, how often people hit refresh, or re-visit your page within the expiration time of the URL that 304s.
Also there's little value in identifying individual visitors. Getting a coarse idea where visitors are located in the world might be nice (for a regional news outlet for example). So just slap some coarse grained. GeoIP on it.
Why do you think you can control what I do with data you send to me? Don't send me data I'd you don't want me to have it.
Are you really interested in rehashing this conversation? You got plenty of answers last time¹, I doubt you'll get new ones
Legal protections, like the GDPR.
Don’t reflect light in my direction if you don’t want me having pictures of you!