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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Yeah as someone who has worked in web development for over 20 years everything in here is completely standard. Almost every major website in existence collects this kind of analytical data.
...and that's a bad thing.
Like the comment I replied to already explained, this information is necessary to make informed development decisions. If you don't know who is using what feature you might be wasting resources on something barely anyone uses while neglecting something everyone needs.
You also need some of that data for security purposes. You can't implement rate limiting or prevent abuse if you can't log and track how your services are being interacted with.
And this is aggregate data. I can promise you not a single person cares about what any individual user is doing (assuming it's not illegal)
It should all be opt in. Aggregate data can be used to personally identify, and even when it's not, it has its own negative effects.
Then you introduce self-selection bias and the data is worthless.
You can't identify someone based on how they interact with a service. If you spend 5 minutes on one page and 2 minutes on another that could be anyone. Even if you for some reason personally knew someone's browsing habits it would be nearly impossible to pick them out in a sea of millions of data points.
I see you linked privacyguides.org in the thread as "alternatives", one of the services it recommends is Proton (Mail, Drive, etc.). Look at their privacy policy:
Or how about addy.io that privacyguides recommends for email forwarding? From their privacy policy:
ALL online services collect this kind of data. Even the privacy-focused ones. There is nothing nefarious about it.
"Analytics are anonymized whenever possible" is vastly more reassuring than "we use all this data".