Given that Homebrew is using GA basically as a raw database / dashboard, the distinction between “google” and “google analytics” feels pointless here. The thin

Given that Homebrew is using GA basically as a raw database / dashboard, the distinction between “google” and “google analytics” feels pointless here. The thing that makes GA worse for your privacy than other 3rd party datastores is the linking/inferences because of its shared nature. If you visit 100 sites that use GA for tracking, Google (and to an extent, those 100 site operators) are benefitting from the joining of your browsing history across all the sites. By contrast, Homebrew is submitted logs to GA with a custom UUID not shared by any other application / requests / browsing that you do, without your IP address, and without any metadata that would link your Homebrew activity to other non-Homebrew activity. They needed a place to send metrics, and GA is providing them the data storage and visualization layers. If I wrote a FUSE filesystem called “GAFS”, that stored arbitrary encrypted files as GA metrics using their API, I’d technically be using GA but it would be weird to file issues about the privacy impact of having GA code in my CLI tool.