How do you keep up with changes in analytics, especially around privacy?

How you keep up: Google's release notes and the Analytics help documentation for platform changes, plus practitioner sources such as Simo Ahava for the implementation depth that official documentation omits. Most usefully, actually implementing changes in a test property before they are required.

On privacy — the substantive part of this question:

• Third-party cookies are gone or going, and browser restrictions such as ITP already limit first-party cookie lifetimes. Cross-site tracking and long attribution windows are no longer reliable.
• Consent is a legal requirement under GDPR and increasingly elsewhere, and consent mode changes what is collected before consent is given. Data will be incomplete by design.
• The consequences for analysis: modelled data fills gaps, so numbers are estimates rather than counts. Attribution is less certain. This should change how confidently you present figures.
• The direction of travel is towards first-party data, server-side tagging, and aggregate rather than individual-level measurement.

Note: Treating privacy compliance as a design constraint rather than an obstacle is the right framing. Saying you would collect less data and be clearer about why is both legally safer and increasingly what users expect.