"Nobody was fired for using Google Analytics" (c)
Is financial burden to change any part of your product, including GA, and 99.99% of all companies in the world don't give a damn about users of their products, so it will never happen unless some global power restructure happens and Google will fall out of grace. And even then most likely it will be simply replaced with even worse GA-2.
I would say that 99.99% of businesses do give a damn about their customers. And particularly they care about their customers' preferences as demonstrated by their economic behavior. Very few customers care whether a business uses GA enough to change their purchasing decisions. Businesses therefore rightly view the decision as neutral with respect to customer preferences.
That customer model is a mental construct of said companies. Just because customer does not proactively ask/request/mention something don't mean that he doesn't care about this. People implicitly assume that their personal information is not used for malicious purposes, despite that it is not true anymore for most of the companies. And in the era of monopolies/doupolies customers don't have vote with their wallet anymore, unless going full luddite and live in a cave.
So, a few objections. Most sites that use Google Analytics are not owned by monopolies or duopolies, so that aspect of your comment does not really apply. I also don't know if your claim r.e. malicious purposes is true. Probably depends on whose definition of malicious you're talking about.
> That customer model is a mental construct of said companies.
Well enough, but as I said, it's the one they care about. You seem to have a dualist view of customers where there are some things they care about that do affect economic behavior, and others they care about but which do not affect their economic behavior. I don't buy that model. I prefer the monist model where in competitive markets the customer expresses the totality of their preferences through economic behavior. I know it's incorrect, like all models, but I think it's least incorrect.
I doubt there's more than a tiny fraction of customers that even knows the existence of Google Analytics. Of them, only a small fraction of those has any idea of its capabilities. And of those customers, only an even smaller fraction even checks whether a site is using it before deciding whether to shop. The notion that a large fraction of customers care about the use of GA just doesn't fit with these other observations and conjectures. Please correct me with data if you think I'm wrong.
And anyway, whether you're right or me, the monist model encompasses everything companies have any incentive to care about, so it's the one that will be used to drive decisions. It's also the one that we can use to predict company behavior.
I suspect that we won't agree on global and complex issues like GA or surveillance (metadata = surveillance after all, see (1)). But I want to discuss more specific issue - "monist model". I disagree that defining what people buy is approximately what people want. Yes, it is in some narrow scope, but that is not all. I can't buy what I want if it doesn't exist, right? And is I buy picking from two set choices while I want some thing different doesn't mean that I wanted what I bought. Example - I have Android phone, but I don't want it specifically, I don't want a gadget filled with permanently enabled Google surveillance. But the alternative is only one - Apple, slightly less but still about the same. The only reason I'm buying them is because I want convenience more than privacy and I'm only human after all.
People don't know about GA, 99.9% don't know. But they do know about their home address or credit card number or SSN or photos. They just don't have proper information to connect all these links.
Just a minor clarification. When I was speaking of customers, I was speaking in aggregate. I'm not making a claim that all individual customers are having their expressions adequately expressed by their purchasing decisions.
