Tracking that kind of information is the worst kind of surveillance there is. You see it as profitable data, but lots of things are profitable or useful, and sometimes society sees things as going too far and those things get restricted or banned. Breaking into people's homes is useful, even if you don't take anything; this distinction is so significant that just the violation of someone's property was made into it's own, separate crime.

The problem is that technology has made the personal boundaries somewhat harder to define, and this is being made worse by the fact that there are a LOT of people that are ignorant about how that technology actually works and a lot of businesses that are finding it really profitable to take advantage of this ignorance. Analytics, for example.

Baring any specific contracts[1], the transaction that is implicit when someone clicks on a link is that their computer will request some other computer (identified by the host in the URL they clicked on), with the expectation that the other side may (or may not) send a document (or document-like thing) back in reply. Unfortunately - and unknown to most people - the technical nature of HTML and especially Javascript have made it easy to include 3rd parties into construction of the page, and for the transaction to continue FAR longer than the initial click+download. As part of that increase in scope, many people have now decided that they have some sort of right to this extension, a right to run Turing complete code on other people's CPUs, and a right for 3rd parties to be involved. None of that exists - we haven't signed a contract - and just because you found a technical trick that lets you accomplish this kind of surveillance doesn't mean you should do it, or that it is morally right.

Asking you for a page obviously consents to you knowing about that request. Logging information about people without their knowledge or consent makes you an overly-nosy neighbor at best, and a stalker that should face criminal charges at worst. The truth is probably somewhere in between those extremes.

Why does this matter? Because as you say - data is how decisions are made. Data wants to be aggregated and aggregated data is an attractive nuisance to people that want to exploit that data. Do you really want to have the fact that you spent N hours reading on some topic to be known whatever government we end up having in the future? Do you think your insurance companies are interested if you read various topics that interest them? There are incalculable potential problems with storing personal data, simply because we cannot predict what subset of that data will be problematic in the future. By logging data at all, you are creating this future - and that makes you an enemy of those of us that still value privacy. I suggest that your business model needs updating. Maybe it only requires being clever and finding a socially-responsible way to make those same decisions. Maybe some business models are pathological, and need to go away. I don't think those lines are perfectly clear yet, so I wish you luck should you choose to pursue a different path.

Oh, and because this is about analytics, that means Google in most cases. A single party. One would think the potential monopolistic issue would be enough to stop using their analytics services. Anyway, if you truly want to learn about what this backlash is about - which is a backlash against all aspects of "surveillance as a business model" - then I recommend watching the link I have posted here several times recently of Aral Balkan's recent talk[2], as he explains things in far more detail. If you have any sense of privacy left, it might just terrify you.

[1] if one side is highly ignorant of what the contract's consequences are, I consider that a contract made in bad faith

[2] https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html...