This. A thousand times this. To me this whole thing feels like the maintainer is trying to justify something that most people won't ever accept as the status quo. Bad times when software this solid is going in a wrong direction. Time for a Homebrew fork?
No need for a fork, if someone was willing to put in the time and money to maintain a private anonymous analytics server, the homebrew folks would be happy to use it.
Unless of course you are fundamentally opposed to tracking of any kind, then a fork is required. It is a fairly massive infrastructure to recreate however...
