I am no Google apologist, but I don’t see anything wrong with this. It’s an increasingly common thing from many companies in response to GDPR and CCPA. The the

I am no Google apologist, but I don’t see anything wrong with this. It’s an increasingly common thing from many companies in response to GDPR and CCPA. The theory (which isn’t backed by case law yet) is that if a user signs up for an account of some kind, a much wider set of tracking data is lawful to collect under the sections of these laws that provide for “necessary” data collection for the operation of the service. Lots of data capture is argued to be required for managing the user session and measuring product usage, both of which are much harder to justify if the user is anonymous. Many companies are moving account sign up as a required step earlier in all funnel or free tier user experiences as a result.