Opt-out should be illegal in all matters concerning privacy, and the punishment should be forty lashes followed by a keelhauling.
Ignoring such silliness as the possibility that a competitor (e.g. Bing) do the same but choose a different tag, making it impossible to opt out of both schemes, Google is essentially requiring that not only countless access points be updated but also that all the devices configured to use them be reset, which in aggregate would cost a lot of money. I will not repeat my previous rant about how Apple's 'simple' consumer products shift the support headache from customers to IT support staff, but this is more of the same.
Attention Google, Congress (I'm specifically thinking of the DST date changes, but there may be more expamples), and anyone else who thinks it's just a minor inconvenience for *us* to do 'just one little thing' to accommodate *you*, keep in mind that we're all scrambling to make a living out here and that the hassle you all cause us is not insignificant, and the damage you do to the economy by requiring us to spend time on things that neither produce goods or services nor improve security, performance, or reliability is, on a national (or multi-national) scale, mind-boggling. If you want to do something you should figure out how to do it safely and securely with *your* resources, not ours, thank you very much!
***** Moderator's Note *****Did someone forget their router password? (Ducks).
Bill Horne Moderator