Dropping Google Analytics on a page is not an active conspiracy.
There's no "active conspiracy" needed as long as this kind of behavior keeps being normalized by comments like the above.
It absolutely is that website deciding to trade data about their visitors in exchange for getting something for free. That's "active sharing" in my book.
But "sharing data" does somewhat suggest they are sharing the payload, the actual conversations.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1011397 says "Regardless of your data sharing settings, your Analytics data may also be used only insofar as necessary to Maintain and protect the Analytics service."
This is a pretty broad leash.
"To maintain the analytics service we need to make money"
All they have is that there was a hit from an IP at a specific date and time. Any cookies they set will let them tell that the same browser came back an hour later - but won't let them join traffic together across multiple sites.
You don't have to be logged in. You don't even have to be a Google customer. They have IP and browser fingerprinting to uniquely identify people through aggregation of all their sources.
I don't believe they do this, partly because if they did it would be something they would want to actively promote as a product to advertisers. Why do the creepy thing if you can't talk about it to make more money?
But technically I do believe it is feasible.