[codingdave]

The "its on the web argument" has a technical backing to it. Google own's their own servers, and understands what their own hardware and software is doing. Collecting metrics on all that makes sense.

It is when you change it to an individual level that it becomes problematic. Instead of talking about what is happening with a product across all users, you are now talking about what a specific person is doing. And that is why tracking at the OS level is more problematic than at a web server level - by definition, my OS is personal usage.