While I agree with the ethical matter, from what I understand Google offered some form of server-side analytics APIs since ages[0]. I know, this is different fr

While I agree with the ethical matter, from what I understand Google offered some form of server-side analytics APIs since ages[0]. I know, this is different from this new GTM server-side thing, but nonetheless it already offered technical ways of proxy-tracking data with whatever infrastructure available, also circumventing ad-blockers. This to say that this server-side approach is nothing totally new. I'm sure some big business already implemented it, you can't just easily notice it everywhere like the client-side counterpart. The difference here is that now Google has tinkered some ready made solution, using its own infrastructure. Maybe it's also a matter of convenience: It has always been mostly trivial to setup some JS to collect this data (often, as easy as just pasting a single script tag in your HTML). Once you need App Engine, DNS setup, etc not every business will likely jump into all this technical burden, and this could slow the adoption of the whole server-side tracking. Or maybe not. Who knows. [0]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v4 https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/...