Legitimate interest is just bullshit.

Can I have your:

• wallet
• emails received
• telephone number
• pin code
• visa card numbers
• browser history
• home address
• dates you won't be home
• alarm code

I too am legitimately interested in this data.

They’re legitimately interested in your data.

Legitimate Interest is an attempt at working around the GDPR using a loophole in the ruling meant to permit processing of data in situations such as when a business has a trading relationship with a client.

However the legal clarification from the EU Commission says: "Your company/organisation must also check that by pursuing its legitimate interests the rights and freedoms of those individuals are not seriously impacted, otherwise your company/organisation cannot rely on grounds of legitimate interest as a justification for processing the data and another legal ground must be found." (see here) and there is a "right to privacy" in EU law.

So supposedly that nearly endless list of "partners" (read: advert providers, trackers and other assorted businesses who make money from breaking people's privacy) cannot use legitimate interest to track you as that would break your right to privacy.

That said, in practice they probably do, and until they get fined hard they'll keep on doing it, so as others said, don't used a Chrome-based browser and use a good Ad Blocker add-on.

OP:

posts about tracking and not consenting to give data away

also OP:

uses Google Chrome

1. Depends on the threat model but usually you don't trust them. It's as simple as that

2. I think the legitimate interest has something to do with giving the data to the government when legally required but it can have other meanings too. Good luck with finding out. Some of them won't tell the truth even if officially asked (unless you work for the government)

3. Everything is somewhat controlled but in terms of data collection and sharing it is absolutely not (e. g. the users' HIV status data on Tumblr or whatever the thing is called)

4. Idk about that

5. Regular protection like Tor, VPN, anti-fingerprinting etc

6. I wouldn't say you are being too paranoid

7. Yes the internet has turned into a horrible place

There's no such thing as legitimate interest. Reject what you can, block everything else with adblockers.

Legitimate interest is a way for the vendors to not need your confirmation. In general, your right to privacy is valued against the vendor's right to operate. The most often used example is advertisement: in general, vendors are allowed to advertise, as they want to operate and sell their products. But you have a right to your data (e.g. mail adress, home adress, interests...). So courts have to value what is more important. Another example that most people would agree is that clubs want to show what happens in the club, so they publish pictures from their activities (interest of club to show they are active vs personal right to your image). As not every case goes to court, most vendors see their interest as more important and interpret "legitimate" interest rather loosely. So in general, the idea of legitimate interest is compliant with the GDPR, although I believe most sites use it too liberal.

fair enough, i have a legitimate interest in always blocking trackers and advertisements in every device i own too

https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic

Use Firefox (or a hardened fork like Mull) with uBlock Origin and you'll never see this BS again

Have https://noyb.eu/en or https://www.eff.org/ or others never covered this ? If not it would be good to get them interested ?

IANAL, but iirc if you're in the eu, legitimate interest is not legal basis for data processing but they may still store it for later use if you ever agree to one of these

It’s their interest, not yours.

I thought legitimate interest meant you were legitimately interested in giving up your data to those vendors????

If it won't let me untick all but the essential cookies easily - close tab, move on.

Recently I realised that some "reject all" options still don't reject the "legitimate" bullshit, so I now avoid those sites too (and no, I don't trust that extensions that claim to reject all for me will actually reject all).

I've got better things to do with my time than scrutinise these cookie pop ups and/or go through lengthy lists individually unticking options. Fuck that noise - don't have minimal respect for users? Then I'm definitely not providing you any of my data (the sites that make it the hardest rarely hold information you can't easily find elsewhere)..

This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.

It's not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it's spelled out like this is a little galling.

Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules

The website is basically admitting that they're using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.

I use temporary container tabs in Firefox. (Desktop, dunno if that works on mobile)

Every new tab I open opens in its own temporary container unless I've chosen otherwise (like for sites I want to remember logins )

So, even if I accept all the cookies, they all disappear with the temporary container after browsing, and don't connect to any other container - only tabs started (e.g. by clicking links) in the same container.

Use a script obfuscator. I've been using one for about a decade now and it's extremely easy to tell when companies are doing illegal spying. Looking at YOU ebay. My full name is not GKDSLGFJDS ZKGWKDSF, you fucking assholes. Enjoy the cement shoes when the advertisers you sold "my information" to find out that it's nothing but strings of randomly long random characters, kinda like what happened to twitter when they started lying and saying everyone who used their platform was SUPER into crypto (Yes, this was pre-Elon. All Musk did was bring the nazism of the platform to the surface. For an example of what twitter was really like you need look no further than BlueSky where you need to go out of your want to "disable nazis" because the CEO is convinced the average person wants to see hitler apologia)