[regis]

Your analogy would only work if the website was actually hosting their own analytics. Using google analytics is quite literally participating in a larger tracking program. It is not the same as individual shops collecting data on customers for their own use.

[dbond]

From Google's perspective, true. Does google actually sell the aggregated data though?

[regis]

I don't know the details of what they do with it. But for instance, someone can purchase ads targeting a specific type of user and google probably uses this browsing data to decide if the user should be targeted for a specific kind of ad or not. That advertiser is in turn getting better ad targeting due to you using google analytics on your website.