You are seeing it right. I will be tracking some kind of anonymous data on this blog of mine to understand the visitor behavior on my blog.
Tools I use to track the data
As of now I have only installed Google Analytics to track the data. I might try some random web analytics tools to understand their functionalities and advantages.
Cookies
The tools listed above and most of the other tools I will be trying use first party cookies and will contain anonymous data. I Do Not track Personal Identification Information of the visitors to my blog.
Email
Your email can only be submitted at one place on the blog i.e., for subscribing to the blog posts which will be via Feedburner service of Google. Every email from Feedburner will contain the link to Unsubscribe if you like to unsubscribe from the service at any point of time.
Opting out of Tracking
You can opt out of tracking by installing any standard plugins or add-ons which can do the job for you. Also you can install this addon to opt out of tracking from Google Analytics. At any point of time, you can turn off the JavaScript support by your browser so that any kind of JavaScript based tools will be stopped.
If you are concerned about a lot of similarities between my blog and Avinash Kaushik's blog, feel free to contact me to give your feedback :)