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It’s amazing how far the goalposts have moved on analytical data. I worked retail in The Time Before The Web and we collected and analyzed data from our custom

It’s amazing how far the goalposts have moved on analytical data. I worked retail in The Time Before The Web and we collected and analyzed data from our customers. We had a door clicker to give us a daily record of traffic. We did detailed analytics on what items customers bought when, to inform inventory and staffing decisions. We did regular people-counting studies to evaluate our merchandising in different parts of the store. We did coupons in local papers for which we could directly track redemption. This was all in the service of making the store work better for our customers. Now, you might say that those are all anonymous aggregate piles of data. Well, so are most web analytics packages, including many client-side JavaScript.

JohnFen 5y ago
No goalposts have moved. The difference between the two is that there's no question that counting heads walking through a door and watching inventory patterns are not personal to the customer. With telemetry, including web analytics, there is always a question because there is no visibility as to their actual practices. It all amounts to "trust us". And we've had more than enough experience with these things to know that such trust is frequently misplaced -- so none of it can be trusted. And GA especially cannot be trusted, and also happens to be pretty much ubiquitous. As a side note, it's become just as dangerous to be in a physical store as online now. People who prefer not to be spied on must pay in cash, be sure to put their phones into airplane mode before entering the store, and so forth. And with the increasing adoption of face recognition in stores, it becomes risky to even show your face. In other words, they have to be as "on guard" in the store as online.