Yes they have the right. No they don't owe me anything (save the service I pay them to provide, which is moot to this discussion).
But it is my trust and they can still lose it. The fact is that I believe this to be shady, and for a company whose motto is "Don't be evil", they raise the standard for trusting them. A standard which I don't believe they are meeting.
Yes. Google damn well knows that no major web browser sends the #hashmark part of the URL in the referrer. They damn well know this breaks every single analytics package out there.
I'm amazed at how staunchly biased you're approaching this. Not only does this article take the first leap of paranoia in stating that Google is doing this to sabotage competition, it goes further to say that somehow Google Analytics will be untouched. It is as if that last one was added just to satiate the author's anger:
"I don't know how they're gonna do it, but...but...they're bad...'cause they're gonna hurt competition, so they'll find some way of not hurting themselves, they have to!"
Besides, the hashmark is a standard of its own when it comes to Ajax applications. Google isn't doing anything suspiciously new with that.
And you think this was their intent? Not to provide a better/faster search experience for THEIR users, but to deprive you of referrer data you were used to?
Yes it's a side effect, but it's ridiculous to say that was the intent of the change.
But it is my trust and they can still lose it. The fact is that I believe this to be shady, and for a company whose motto is "Don't be evil", they raise the standard for trusting them. A standard which I don't believe they are meeting.