Why shouldn't site owner know you've visited their site? How will they do their job if they don't know where people come from, what content they enjoy, what devices they should optimized for, general demographic of their audience, etc.
These are all the things a restourant owner would know about their customers, for example. But no one seems to have a problem with that.
While I am not as concerned about big tech's data siloing as some, I can see why it's worrying.
Unfortunately, not only is GA the best totally free analytics solution that any marketeer will know how to use, many ad blockers nuke ALL analytics scripts, even if they have nothing to do with google.
That's because you don't need analytics scripts to see if people visiit your site - you have the original page request for that. Analytics script collect additional information beyond that, which users that block them have deemed to be not acceptable.
I think people in general have gotten so sick of ad powered big tech they are having a bit of an over-reaction against analytics in general, not just google's product.
They would just know implicitly by observing their customers who are right in front of their eyes. (At least pre-covid)
The restaurant I visit most often "knows" only my first name (only) plus my mobile phone number, I suppose if they really tried they could probably collect data on my approximate height, build, eye and hair colour, and that I have multiple kids. That's it (since I pay them in cash).
Oddly enough they don't worrying about tracking their customers and instead focus on delivering an excellent product with excellent service. They're known in the region for that, they're usually busy, so one might think their strategy seems to be working(?)
All together, that's more data than a Google Analytics user knows about any of their visitors.
Also, feels like a bit of an arbitrary boundary.
And why should a random page I visit get to know my demography, interests and where I come from? How can you portray avoiding that as taking privacy too far??
I don't care if that makes it harder to optimize your business. Find another way or perish.
You don't have a problem with them knowing that.
Of course in any case Google knows and they choose how much they want to tell you.
Nevertheless, I don't feel iffy about my Interests profile participating in aggregate data available to the sites I visit. Since virtually all sites are free of charge, giving some of that insight back seems like a fair trade.
That said, having ALL that data available to Google without anonymization is a bit more worrying, although I haven't seen many examples where it hurt someone in real world.
Web site owners can analyze their web server's log, which has at least client's IP address, user agent, timestamp and the URL. Already too much if you ask me.
> general demographic of their audience
This is not useful to improve a product unless combined with proper research into the demo, which most people don't do. They just apply their own biases and make their product _worse_.
So many people are making all their decisions based on shallow data like this and never do a simple usability test that yields massively more impact.
Put differently, people use this data to try to focus in on specific traits of their audience before even testing that their software works for "humans".
Also, you have zero control of what code any client executes on their machine. Zero say, whatsoever.
So what about sites that claim that certain cookies are necessary for operation of the site, when that's at best bending the truth and at worst an outright falsehood?
Many sites work perfectly well and - amusingly - become blazingly fast once you block all scripting and cookies. No annoying GDPR notices, no annoying ads, no (client-side) tracking. So much for "necessary" cookies :/