Nothing. Having a toggle for "legitimate interest" is nonsense. The GDPR lists some exceptions to when you need to ask for permission, these are "legitimate interests". Things like remembering someones IP to keep track of bans is allowable without needing to ask for permission.

Of course advertising agencies promptly went to work trying to bend the language of GDPR so they can claim they are a legitimate interest and therefore exempt. It won't hold up in court.

The GDPR is surprisingly strict, and a LOT of the cookie popups you see in the wild are not at all compliant. To give an example: having your "accept" and "reject" buttons a different font size is explicitly not allowed.

Nothing, but if you scroll at the bottom of the form, you have a link to all vendors, and under each one what they consider their legitimate interest is. At least gdpr forced them into transparency, although it is so hidden and there are so many that probably 0.0000001% of people go and check

I always read this as "legitimate for them, and not for me" and untick it.

It isn't.

Block all tracking.

You can say it's legitimate interest, doesn't make it true.

The "legitimate interests" are only legitimate for their and their advertisers data collecting, not your experience (never mind privacy and security). It's just a scummy workaround to avoid regulation.

Even so called "necessary" cookies are often bloated with shit that isn't really necessary (and often leave out necessary functions from where they belong and include them in a separate "functionality" category, where they can pile on extra trackers, especially social media ones).

The worst part is, that some "decline all" don't decline these so called legitimate trackers, so I double check to make sure they are all deselected (sometimes it's an "object to legitimate interests" other times you have to click through to the list and deselect them manually. If it's one of the latter and it won't let me deselect all at once, I leave the site. There isn't any piece of information worth unticking hundreds of boxes for). (ETA: I've found that one of the worst offenders of this is fandom wiki sites, which is where breezewiki comes in and saves the day! If their search function doesn't find what you're looking for, try looking for the fandom you're after + breezewiki on your search engine of choice and if it exists, it will come up)

Never trust companies to have anything but their own interests in mind.

They're legitimately interested in spying on you and selling your data.

Legitimate interest: "User has a pulse."

This is a provision of the article 6 of the GDPR, which describes very broadly that you have to justify your legitimate interest with a fair reason to process user data. It is mostly there to allow for IT security, fraud prevention, but also marketing.

Unfortunately, the way the regulation is written is quite imprecise and subject to interpretation. You can read this page, it will give you an insight on the possible interpretations:

https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimate-interest/

My understanding is that you have the choice between the following modes :

• Consent = you allow for personalized data collection and ads integration can make use of any tracking information saved in your browser and on the servers of the third party provides
• Legitimate interest = you allow for data collection without personalization, but the provider might still be context aware and provide for example ads based on broad information like your country, language etc
• Nothing = you refuse any processing and connection to a third party server

What does it say when you hover/click on the question mark next to it?

I wish there were more lawyers who would deal with companies that do this kind of stuff.

I'm assuming that whatever the law in each country consider legitimate.

This has been bothering me too. Hope you get an answer.