You know that inserting a Google Analytics tracking script is a.) one of the most common things a web developer does anyways and b.) a very helpful and common-sense feature coming from a Google product?
> You know that inserting a Google Analytics tracking script is a.) one of the most common things a web developer does anyways and b.) a very helpful and common-sense feature coming from a Google product?
Not at all. I realize Google by having dominant search-engine marketshare and obfuscating their search-terms from their referrer url makes visitor analysis literally impossible without joining the Google Analytics dragnet, but that doesn't mean that everyone is willing to do so, nor that they will do it every time. It may in fact be illegal for one to do so.
One example would be doing business with local government agencies and having to comply with EU data-locality rules. Will adding Google analytics to my site violate those rules? I don't know. But I know I wouldn't risk me being in compliance or not up to chance. Automatically adding third party US-based user-tracking to my service certainly doesn't sound very compliant.
Another example would be if you already have concrete TOS with your customer-base which does not include leaking customer data to a unrelated third party, and especially if you deliver on site software to buying customers. If I bought some software, deployed it on my network and then discovered it was spying on me and reporting everything I did to google, I would be pretty pissed off.
Adding it automatically to my product "out of the box" for a completely unrelated service (nginx optimizations) is akin to drive-by installers of the Windows desktop-age.
You know what they say about ducks: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
This looks like spyware, deploys like spyware and behaves like spyware. I think it's safe to call it spyware.
Google: Remember that thing about not being evil? Yeah, let's get back to that.
> ... makes visitor analysis literally impossible without joining the Google Analytics dragnet,
Google Analytics does not give you referrer information from Google search. They keep that to themselves regardless of if you use their analytics software or not.
The only things they do is (a) integrate with webmaster tools which you can use without Google Analytics to give you general search term aggregates and (b) integrate with Google Ads to show your campaign performance, which any other analytics service can do as well.
