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There is quite a difference between them, google analytics on your website would be more akin to an individual shop tracking the people who walk inside. I think a better comparison for these "tracking bins" would be your ISP logging your traffic and selling metrics to third parties. The key difference here is that it was public, in a place you thought you wouldn't be tracked, ever.

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Your analogy would only work if the website was actually hosting their own analytics. Using google analytics is quite literally participating in a larger tracking program. It is not the same as individual shops collecting data on customers for their own use.

From Google's perspective, true. Does google actually sell the aggregated data though?

I don't know the details of what they do with it. But for instance, someone can purchase ads targeting a specific type of user and google probably uses this browsing data to decide if the user should be targeted for a specific kind of ad or not. That advertiser is in turn getting better ad targeting due to you using google analytics on your website.

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