> at least they don't leak visitors' data to various shady third parties One would have to be extremely paranoid to think that most mainstream third-party data

> at least they don't leak visitors' data to various shady third parties One would have to be extremely paranoid to think that most mainstream third-party data analytics providers are "shady", most of these providers (Segment, Amplitude, etc) all have clauses in the contracts that specify the end-user (the company in this case) as the owner of the data, and limit their usage of data to providing the services (meaning they're contractually obligated to NOT sell or do anything with the data). In any case, it's a meaningless distinction, as the company could easily record all this data with native, first-party JS and proxy it to anyone they want on the backend and you would have no idea and no control over such a thing. This is already starting to happen, making all of the fuss about third-party metrics effectively just "privacy theater". At the end of the day your behavioral data is going to the party whose software you're using, and if you don't trust them there is nothing that is going to stop them from doing whatever they want with that information.