I never consent to give my data away or being tracked, but how do you deal with so called legitimate interest? I tried several times to untick them but it is a long list (in fact at the bottom there is a “vendors” link with even longer, much longer list. It took me 10 minutes to get to the bottom of it once).
My questions:
-how can we trust these so called legitimate interests when they are self defined by companies whose business model relies on your data?
-how can we find out what these legitimate interests are and what data it collects?
-are such companies controlled in any way?
-is this kind of consent form compliant with EU gdpr? (normally opt out is to be as easy as opt in, and there is no “refuse all” for these so called legitimate interests).
-what are your strategies against such sites tracking you? Or am I just being paranoid?
The sheer amount vendors is daunting, the Internet really turned into crap
Edit: when clicking Preferences at the bottom the content of the legitimate interested is spelled out for each vendor, so this replies one of my questions.
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.