You are really trying to force me off the web altogether! But "the good of the customer"? Sorry, that is just stuff, its for the good of the developer making the almighty dollar, nothing more.
No its how the web makes money for anyone period.
It costs money to support the browser you currently use, if we had no idea what browser people used then we would pick 1 and if you weren't using it you would be the one SOL. Then the internet would end up in segmented branches because some companies would believe that only customers use IE 9 and others that only think that customers use Chrome. This would be bad for the consumer you.
Yes we track all of this I listed and much more.
The Ad you click, well Google or someone negoitates with advertisement companies for that AD space. If you didn't know how many people clicked it or even saw it then you would never know how much $ value this Ad brings you.
The newsletter email you get from a company, that link in it is tracked because we want to know how many people are actually interested in this. This takes hours and hours to write plan, write up, and send out the 1 newsletter you get. Since we track the clicks, we know exactly the $ value it brings us versus the $ value it cost us.
The webpage you visit, we track every page you visit, so we know the pages that are the most attractive to customers. This is important for redesigning, and for the customer because we will make the pages being loaded the most the home page or links on the home page to make it easier. We know how many visitors we have within an hour, or a day, and this justifies the $ value we spend on a website. It also helps the developers because the developers can justify the changes made. If you change the site and have 23% more traffic and 2% of your visitors are clicking Ad's, and 5% are buying items from your online store, well you just increased your companies sales by 23% with the increased traffic.
We usually even track when you start filling out forms and don't finish them, such as Filling out a form on a checkout page. There might be 2 or 3 steps, and since its all tracked we can see that 15% of customers drop out between Step 2 and Step 3. This is 15% potential sales lost and now that we know this we can make the steps easier or investigate if there is an error.
If you want a good example, recently I was in a meeting discussing our platform redesign for autos and they wanted to implement Chat functionality with dealers for both mobile and Desktop. I simply asked 1 question, what % of customers are visiting these pages from mobile, and they said 2-5%, and that was enough to stop all discussion about mobile. That's easily 30,000 to 50,000 we saved right there in planning, developing, and testing for something the users aren't even using.
If we didn't know all of this, if we didn't know that IE browsers were encountering errors on our site, then every time we made any change at all we would have to test every single piece of functionality on every single browser that we choose to support. This would never happen, nothing would ever get done, and the consumer would be the one losing out.
This is the same tracking Steam does for publishers like Paradox. Paradox knows that most users that buy the game use a 1200 by 720 resolution or higher, so they can develop a game based on 1200 by 720 instead of a 800 by 600. They know that 80% of users have AMD cards, so they can focus most of their testing on AMD's. All of this makes for a better game in the end.
NONE OF THIS can be tracked back to you though, I could never look at any of this and see that USER Bluestreak2k5 uses X and Y and does Z. This is all generalized information that is tracked and put together so we can get big picture ideas and make business decisions on this, the same way Paradox made a business decision to only support Steam because they knew the amount of sales from Steam, sales from other places, the cost involved, and came to the conclusion it was a net loss to support other platforms.
