Yes, and when you go shopping and pay with cash in a store with no surveillance, your shopping habits are being shared against your wishes with a random third party (the external company bookkeeper).

It's disingenuous to have problems with websites collecting entirely anonymous browsing data -- that goes beyond any arguments for privacy and just steers into "yelling at clouds" territory.

I understand your concern. It's also an analytics service. But I believe we are very different [1]. We deliberately collect very little data [2].

There is a big difference between "a person's surfing data" or "surfing data of all visitors combined". That's what we promise with Simple Analytics.

[1] https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/why-simple-analytics-is-a-g...

[2] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-collect

You may have a good/decent/important broad point in general, but it's somewhat off-topic here. EU privacy directives and legislation are not particularly concerned (yet) with banning the sharing of data with third-parties, the focus at the moment is purely on regulating that sharing of data and ensuring it's only being shared with compliant third parties via compliant means.

In this case, Google is non-compliant but the gp's service/tool does appear to be. I think you're underplaying the distinction here quite severely.

TL;DR this is about what's illegal, not what's "evil".

it's not the privacy-first analytics tool neither. It's a tool.

Matomo is the privacy-friendly analytics tool that comes to my mind anyway.

(I have nothing to do with Matomo other than I used PhpMyVisites a few years ago. It had time to change its name twice since then)

You raise an interesting point. Who's data is it?

If you walk into a grocery store, and cameras record which aisle you walk down, which items you stop to look at and which things you buy. Is that legal?

What if the cameras block out your face and all identifying features. Is that legal?

Do you own a blob of a person walking down an aisle? Does the grocery store?