> A product that relies on data to make decisions does.
My experience tells me that most "data-driven" products are absolute trash. The best products I've used were developed in the good, old-school way of someone having a concept of how the product should be, common sense, user research and feedback.
Nowadays I see shit changing all the time for no good reason because I guess somewhere there must be a 0.1% short-term increase in some metric, while annoying a bunch of people and eroding their goodwill.
I also don't feel "free" using a product with analytics because I don't always want my usage pattern to skew the data and make the product change in any way. There are times when I do weird things for good reasons, but it doesn't mean I want the weird thing to become the primary way to interact with the product because someone wanted to make a "data driven" decision.
> I'm totally against ad tracking where a company can identify what I do on multiple websites and link my browsing behavior
You do understand that third-party analytics services can do exactly that? And those provided by advertising companies like Google probably do use the data for their own purposes as well.