IE9 comes with preinstalled 'do not track'

[ergophobe]

it will impact on any type of third party analytics

So it will be back to log file analysis? I could live with that if this feature provides real privacy protection of any sort.

If I take the analytics Javascript and host it on my server, it is no longer a "third party script". But it can still collect data and with just the tiniest bit of creativity, that data can still be passed on to a third party service.

What you can't do, is buy ad space, create script-based  ads (like CJ) and get analytics results. But IE can't know which of my scripts is used for tracking and which ones not and much of the data that gets passed to analytics can't be blocked from Javascript without rendering it useless - screen res, stuff like that.

So it makes it really hard to track users as they go from one site to another. It makes it harder to set affiliate cookies, so that's a big challenge. But you should still be able to go well beyond log file analysis.

One other thing - this sort of gives Google a strange possible advantage. Since so many sites are using Google as a CDN to serve JQuery and fonts and things like that, Google will very likely get white listed, whereas Get Clicky not so much. Interested to see how this plays out.