I disagree with this take. There is "the site" and there is all the 3rd parties "invited" by "the site". Not connecting to the 3rd parties will significantly lower the data mined & sent to countless 3rd parties -- no way this is a reduction of privacy.
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That's a misinterpretation of what I said. I called it a useful, opportunistic privacy improvement falling into the same school as antivirus of enumerating badness. It's not a fundamental privacy improvement. Ultimately, it doesn't really work, and just targets low-hanging fruit.
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If most of the tracking scum was competent enough to even just read its own webserver logs, why do these companies bother with serving hundreds of kilobytes of bullshit JS tracking code for every single page impression?
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Google Analytics doesn't use fingerprinting. It doesn't get deployed to sites via middleware. It's not deeply integrated into content. So sure, it's easily blocked. It's also not scary. It's doesn't try to bypass using a VPN + Incognito. It's not aimed at tracking individuals.
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See, this is the issue. People are worried about being tracked by services that are explicitly stated to be gathering analytics and marked as such. Nothing about this is hidden, and it largely doesn't bother trying to evade blocking. Now, what about all the useful content?
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Even simply talking about third party assets included on a site, a service doing something like providing comments can and does do just as much tracking. However, you can't just opportunistically strip it out since it's part of the functionality.
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So, for example, if your concern is with Google tracking you, why would you only be blocking their analytics service and not everything else like YouTube code? The reason is because this is just opportunistic harm reduction. Code can be first party too. It's just not a solution.
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Youtube loaded as 1st party will end up in a different container then Youtube as a 3rd party service in my Browser. Also, I've kicked out shit like "search completion", use startpage.com instead of Google, and I mostly allow only static/passive content from Google CDN.
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So, concretely, how does making yourself stand out more to Google as someone incredibly unique improve your privacy? If you make it so you can be tracked solely via an incredibly unique, odd browser fingerprint triggering all kinds of unique situations, what's private about it?
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For the most part, Google will probably not see much more of me than random requests of Youtube videos and very seldom downloads of webfonts from their CDN (Decentraleyes FTW), and even more seldom cases where I allow Recaptcha. Always: Faked referer, cookies/DOM storage cleared.
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I doubt that, and you definitely stand out, not just to Google, but to less ethical and more nefarious organizations. You did their job for them. You made yourself easily tracked. I don't get it, sorry. It doesn't make any sense when applying critical thinking to the approach.