As a Homebrew user, thanks for your efforts. I'm totally fine with the change myself, and I apologize for everyone else in here who cares about their privacy, but doesn't really care about the time volunteers are committing, nor the time savings from this feature.

I concur, thank you for wanting to do a better job with readily available tools that are widely used and easy to implement. I support your use of GA.

Add a feature where users can opt-in for periodic reports to be uploaded as a private gist, and a link is transmitted to you. GitHub is already a trusted party where Homebrew is concerned, so the loss of privacy is minimal. Users control their own GitHub accounts, so they control of the permanence of the data you collect on them. You can use Google Forms to transmit the links, so your infrastructure is cheap-to-free. For bonus points, encrypt the links with your public key.

How does that sound?

We don’t want personal data; we only care about aggregation. Being able to link each gist to its owner would be a privacy issue here.

Excellent point, I should've thought of that.

So the project is short-handed, but wants to take on scouring analytics to start packaging common things people are doing with the software.

If you're too busy to do this "right" why bother? Are you hoping making more shortcuts will increase adoption?

Current employer doesn't much care about these things, but last employer did. Having shared this thread with their IT folks, they've decided to cut people off from homebrew while they figure it out.

I guess costing yourself users is one way to free up some time.

As I wrote we’d be very grateful if you had any suggestion.

Have you tried getting donations for the project? Have you tried joining a foundation that supports open source projects (like Apache)?

Yes we recently joined the Software Freedom Conservancy so we can now accept donations.