I didn't make a judgement on the fact that it's good or bad for the user in my previous post, albeit my opinion is mostly negative.
Very poorly collected data, analyzed by people without much understanding about ux/product or data, and without any sensibility or intelligence took the place of thorough user interviews.
An example: in an ecommerce I've worked, a much better image gallery was released to show products than the previous one. All data showed users interacted with it much more. But it also showed conversion going down. The old gallery nobody used was then picked again and conversion went up again.
Now, what really happened was that users liked the gallery, what they didn't like where the pictures of the items. Those made them re-think buying it.
Thus, a crappier version of the website was released again, and users ended up having a worse experience, all in the name of the better conversion.
Seriously, with all due respect, I worked enough on front end and data collection to know that the whole tracking is generally harmful towards the user, slows down websites considerably, violates their privacy, leads to a worse experience and only rarely shows anything meaningful that user interviews wouldn't got.
It's mostly snake oil for c-suite, data "analysts" and product people and marketing so they can pretend they are providing any value. They generally aren't.
