People get way too offended by analytics tracking when it's there for their benefit. While I agree with the rest of your comment, isn't it possible that analyt

People get way too offended by analytics tracking when it's there for their benefit. While I agree with the rest of your comment, isn't it possible that analytics is just snake oil for webmasters? The third party services like GA collect a staggering amount of real-time aggregate data in return for sharing a sliver of it with webmasters in the form of pretty graphs. I'm not saying this information isn't useful, but can webmasters reconcile the results against their own logs? Can they submit sanitized logs for analysis instead of including code in web pages, so they can proactively protect user privacy while sharing only the minimum data necessary for their needs? In any case, analytics services aren't motivated purely by altruism and their business model plausibly extends beyond purely providing a service to webmasters.