(Full disclosure: I've been working in analytics since 1999 and founded a web analytics business as well as consulted many fortune 500s and non-US government agencies on their management and usage of data. I'm naturally pre-disposed to not trust Google. I have a technology background in systems design engineering, as well as a business and economics background)
There's one major problem that many people don't realize: The value in that data is immense and Google has corned the market in both analytics (recording the data) and advertising (using the data to profit). This profit comes directly at the expense of businesses - This means lower margins because they must pay higher ad prices to be competitive and attract or retain (see re-targeting on doubleclick) their existing customers who Google knows more about. The customers are worse off because the products they know and love get out-competed by similar knock-offs who invest less in the product/service development but more in ads. This tends to make prices for people higher over the long run and the benefit they get lower over the long run. It's like a Google tax which also reduces options.
Heh, and that's saying that the NSA isn't already paying Google for their https private certs and using the massive mountain of customer data already. I'm tending to think that the NSA has already though of that one.
And that's why it feels so good to block all hits to `google-analytics.com`. There is a choice of extensions that do the job. Sites which do not work because of that blocking are probably very rare.
To add to that, I would advise blocking even more than just that domain. I would even advise blocking all third-party static assets hosted on a google/doubleclick/etc. domain. (If there are assets that are needed to prevent breaking functionality such as web fonts or otherwise, then caching them on your own server (or router in the case of personal use) is recommended. This advice might put the reason behind google caching the images in emails into perspective. (google's email image caching tactic wasn't about email marketing, it was about keeping more and more re-targeting data to themselves)
Google Webfonts makes use of user-agent sniffing to determine your OS, and depending on your OS they optimize the font served to the font-renderer in your system.
Interesting. It seems like something that could and should be packaged into a simple JavaScript to reduce chatter and synchronous calls in the JavaScript pipeline rather than having a blocking server call. (So that it can be distributed and cached without upstream requirements)
Certainly. Discovery of alternative services is vastly different when learning through a friend who had a great experience (unpaid) as opposed to learning about a service through a carefully constructed (paid) marketing plan. Often the marketing plan has significant resources compared to the investment in the product itself. The strength of a marketing effort (including how well it can convince and how well it's targeted) determines the winner. If one learns of an alternative service but the marketing sizzle has confused customers of existing products, then the advantage goes to the stronger marketing team, not the stronger product.
It seems like this would depend on whether marketing is used for good or evil. For example, showing a lot of people how your project actually works and why you might want to use it (as Apple does sometimes) is taking the high road. A stronger marketing campaign may work well due to better user education, in which case it's not necessarily "unfair" that a somewhat weaker but better-understood product wins.
But of course there are the usual dirty tricks, too, causing user confusion as you mention.
Very true. I really want to see more companies taking the high road. It's unfortunate seeing the state of marketing. The food industry for example - people are not eating more healthy meals as a result.
There's one major problem that many people don't realize: The value in that data is immense and Google has corned the market in both analytics (recording the data) and advertising (using the data to profit). This profit comes directly at the expense of businesses - This means lower margins because they must pay higher ad prices to be competitive and attract or retain (see re-targeting on doubleclick) their existing customers who Google knows more about. The customers are worse off because the products they know and love get out-competed by similar knock-offs who invest less in the product/service development but more in ads. This tends to make prices for people higher over the long run and the benefit they get lower over the long run. It's like a Google tax which also reduces options.
Heh, and that's saying that the NSA isn't already paying Google for their https private certs and using the massive mountain of customer data already. I'm tending to think that the NSA has already though of that one.