I hate Google.
Not the way I hate Brussels sprouts or tuna, where I can just avoid them and move on with my day.
I hate Google the way you hate something you cannot escape, something that has positioned itself as the accepted default in an industry I work in every single day, whether I like it or not.
Let me be specific about what I mean, because "I hate Google" by itself is not an argument, it is just noise.
Search Console Gets A Pass
Google Search Console is the closest thing to an exception I make. It shows you what people are actually typing into Google when they find your site. There is no substitute for that specific data because nobody else owns Google's search behavior. Bing has its own version, and I use it too, but it captures a fraction of the traffic because it is a fraction of the market. If you want to know what people search on Google, you have to get that information from Google. Fine. That one is not optional, and I do not pretend otherwise.
Google Analytics is a completely different thing, and this is where I actually have a problem.
Nothing From Google Is Free
Google's search is not free. Google's email is not free. Google Analytics is not free. None of it has ever been free, not for one single day since any of these products launched. You are not the customer. You are the product being measured, packaged, and fed into an advertising business that made Google one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world.
Google Analytics sits on your website, watches every visitor who comes through, and sends that behavioral data back to a company whose entire business model is selling access to exactly that kind of information. You are handing over your own customers' behavior, for free, to a company that turns around and monetizes it. Calling that free is not just inaccurate, it is a lie that has been repeated so many times that almost nobody questions it anymore.
How This Became Taboo To Question
Here is what actually makes me angry. Somewhere along the way, using anything other than Google Analytics became suspicious. Not just uncommon, suspicious. If you tell another web developer or a marketing person that you do not run Google Analytics, you get a look. What do you mean you don't use Analytics. How do you even know what's happening on the site. As if Google's tool is the only legitimate way to understand your own traffic, and anyone who built something else, or uses something else, must be hiding incompetence behind it.
That is not skepticism. That is a monopoly succeeding so completely that the alternative has been made to feel illegitimate by default. Google did not have to outlaw competitors. It just had to become so universally assumed that questioning it looks like the strange choice instead of the reasonable one.
I am done pretending that is normal. It is not normal. It is taboo, and it is taboo because Google built it that way, and an entire industry went along with it without asking why.
The Bigger Picture Nobody Talks About
Google does not hide the mechanism, they document it themselves. Google Analytics 4 has a built-in feature called Google Signals. When it is enabled, and it is one toggle away from being enabled on nearly every Analytics account, it uses data from visitors signed into a Google account with ad personalization turned on to build a cross-device, cross-platform profile of that person's behavior. Google's own support documentation states this data can be shared with other linked Google products, including Google Ads, for things like remarketing audiences.
Most business owners running Google Analytics have never heard of Google Signals, do not know whether it is enabled on their own site, and were never asked in any meaningful way whether they wanted their visitors fed into Google's advertising ecosystem.
I will say plainly what I actually believe, and I cannot prove this, it is my own opinion. I do not believe the tracking stops at whatever toggle is officially documented. A company that offers free email, free search, a free operating system, and a free browser is not doing any of that out of generosity. I think the disclosed mechanisms are the floor, not the ceiling, and I am not willing to bet my clients' data on the idea that Google's actual practices end exactly where the support documentation says they do.
That is not something I can hand you a source for. It is a judgment call, based on watching how this company operates for twenty years. You are free to disagree with me on that part. What is not up for debate is the documented mechanism above, that is Google's own words, not mine.
They Even Dropped The Pretense
Don't Be Evil
Google's original motto, adopted back in 2000.
Not a marketing slogan. It was written directly into the company's own code of conduct as a stated internal principle.
In 2015, when Google restructured under a new parent company called Alphabet, the language quietly shifted to "Do the right thing." The original phrase lingered for a few more years in Google's own code of conduct, until sometime between April and May of 2018, when it was removed almost entirely from the document. Google never issued a public explanation.
It was not announced. Outside reporters found the change by comparing archived versions of the page.
I remember when that happened, and I remember thinking the same thing then that I think now.
Do the right thing for who?
Because it clearly was not written for the businesses whose visitor data gets fed into an advertising system they never explicitly agreed to. It was not written for the people who have no idea Google Signals exists, or that it can be toggled on with one click by someone who read a setup guide and clicked through every recommended option without asking what any of them actually did.
"Don't Be Evil" was at least a standard you could hold a company to and watch them fail it. "Do the right thing" doesn't say who the right thing is for. I do not think that was an accident either.
Why I Built My Own
I could not stand it anymore, so I built Upveyor (https://upveyor.com). My own uptime monitoring, my own traffic analytics, my own contact form attribution, all running on infrastructure I own, none of it routed through Google, none of it feeding an advertising network, none of it treating a client's visitor data as a product to be sold somewhere else.
It tracks the same fundamentals anyone actually needs. Which pages get visited. How someone found the site. What device they used. What led them to actually submit a contact form. All of it lives on my own servers, answers to nobody but the client whose website it is watching, and never gets handed to a third party to be monetized behind their back.
This was not built because Google Analytics is technically bad. It works fine, mechanically. It was built because I refuse to keep handing my clients' data to a company that will use it for something my clients never agreed to and most of them do not even know is happening.
What This Costs Business Owners
Most small business owners have no idea their visitor data is being routed through an advertising company. They were told to "add Google Analytics" the same way they were told to get a Google Business Profile, as an unquestioned item on a checklist, never explained, never really consented to in any meaningful sense beyond clicking through a cookie banner nobody reads.
That is not a technical failure. That is an entire industry treating a for-profit company's data collection tool as neutral infrastructure, because everyone else does it too, and nobody wants to be the one who asks why.
I Am Not Asking Permission Anymore
I do not use Google Analytics on my own site, and I do not put it on my clients' sites either. Upveyor exists because I decided that a business owner's own visitor data belongs to that business owner, not to whichever company happened to make the most convenient dashboard.
If that makes me the odd one out in an industry that has fully accepted Google as the default for everything, so be it.
I would rather be the developer who built something different than the one who never questioned why everyone else was giving it all away for free.
