After some thought I have decided to move away from Google Analytics and over to the Matomo Analytics to track visits to this site.
The main reason for this is to respect the privacy of people who come to this website. Google is one of largest data collectors and aggregators in the digital world. One of the ways they collect their data is through people using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows website owners to collect and analyze website traffic. Google then use all of this data to build profiles on people based on which websites they visit to gauge affinity to certain topics and other things. As someone who values privacy I decided to opt out of this system.
I had been using the standard Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics combination. Now I am using a self hosted version of Matomo Analytics (Tutorial to come on setting this up).
Matomo Analytics is a robust open source toolbox for tracking website analytics. It allows me to take full ownership and responsibility for the data.
More to come on this as I experiment with the platform.