[mnort9]

I find this to be more of a PR stunt that says "Google tries to care about privacy..."

With every change they make to Google search, they put more value on a site's user experience. Now they take away data that is used to improve user experience... smh

If GA users are abiding by their terms and not collecting private info, why is this necessary? Punish all b/c we don't feel like investigating who is actually wronfully collecting private info?

[rchmura]

It's more than a PR stunt - it's actually misleading people into thinking that there are tools which can reduce or block the data that is sent to google - when in fact this tool doesn't do that at all. This tool only stops the data from being added into the reports that the webmaster sees.

More irony: is that private browsing without cookies will disable this feature all together. I know right?

The biggest loser in this whole thing is the startup/webmaster who has google installed on their site.

[callumlocke]

But if it was a PR stunt wouldn't it have more design to it? It looks like some kind of legal compliance thing, not something they want to get any attention.

[rchmura]

Could be both. I looks like it was just made a long time ago with older design standards. It is commonly used in discussion & feature comparison to make people think that they can opt out. Even implying that webmasters have some control over their data (which they don't have)