Dropping the botnet

Google Analytics sent me an email earlier today about changes in their data retention policy:

Today we introduced granular data retention controls that allow you to manage how long your user and event data is held on our  

servers. Starting May 25, 2018, user and event data will be retained  

according to these settings; Google Analytics will automatically delete  

user and event data that is older than the retention period you select.  

Note that these settings will not affect reports based on aggregated data.

Action: Please review these data retention settings and modify as needed.

Before May 25, we will also introduce a new user deletion tool that allows  

you to manage the deletion of all data associated with an individual user  

(e.g. site visitor) from your Google Analytics and/or Analytics 360  

properties. This new automated tool will work based on any of the common  

identifiers sent to Analytics Client ID (i.e. standard Google Analytics  

first party cookie), User ID (if enabled), or App Instance ID (if using  

Google Analytics for Firebase). Details will be available on our Developers  

site  

I decided to delete Google Analytics tracking code from both Massive VPS and Massive Scale websites. It was an invaluable tool in the early days when we still had to advertise in Adwords but these days there's really no excuse for voluntarily sending our visitors' data to Google.