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.

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

OP:

posts about tracking and not consenting to give data away

also OP:

uses Google Chrome

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

Just autowipe cookies on pageloads. Use fast rotating vpn, tunnel through tor twice, run computer in ram only, remove all storage devices.

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

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

Your browser can block cookies.

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 ?

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

It’s their interest, not yours.