Four places where measurement broke, with sources.

GA4 withholds rows from reports to stop anyone inferring a user’s identity, using thresholds Google sets and you can’t adjust.[1] Consent-mode modeling only switches on above 1,000 denied events a day for 7 days and 1,000 granted users a day on 7 of the last 28 days, and meeting that still doesn’t guarantee eligibility.[2]

Event-level retention on a standard property is 2 or 14 months.[3] The free daily BigQuery export is capped at 1 million events a day.[4] None of that is wrong for a free tool. It just means the revenue in your analytics and the revenue in your order system are produced by different processes, and only one of them can be audited.

Twenty US states had comprehensive privacy laws in effect by 2026.[5] The 2025 enforcement actions share a pattern: the companies had banners, but the data kept moving.

• Healthline paid $1.55M to the California AG after it kept sending identifiers and article titles to ad partners after users opted out, despite having a GPC detector and a banner.[6]
• Tractor Supply was fined $1.35M by the CPPA; its failures included not honouring GPC.[7]
• The CPPA also reached settlements with Honda ($632,500) and Todd Snyder ($345,178), whose opt-out portal failed for 40 days.[8][9]

In September 2025 California, Colorado and Connecticut announced a joint sweep targeting Global Privacy Control.[10]

32.5% of US internet users used an ad blocker in Q2 2025.[11] Safari caps cookies set by scripts at a 7-day expiry.[12] Filter lists now target server-side tagging subdomains by name, so “first-party” alone keeps eroding.[13]

Cookies going away isn’t the cause: Chrome kept third-party cookies in 2025.[14] The cause is blockers, browsers and consent law, and all three are already here.

Mixpanel lists 20 million events a month at $1,635 a month on annual billing.[15] Agency reporting tools commonly charge per client, for example $20 per client per month on annual billing.[16] Agencies reporting on GA4 through Looker Studio also run into API quota errors.[17]

SaaS platforms want analytics inside their own product: a vendor survey found 78% already ship in-product dashboards, which users rate 3.6 out of 5.[18]