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.
While you’re right conceptually, this isn’t what the wording means in terms of consent dialogs. Legitimate interest means they can assume, legitimately, that you have an interest in aspects of the site (by you being there) that require X cookies, basically. Ie their product is providing functionality they can assume you’re interested in just by being there, and they’re “pre approving” the tracking/storage for that functionality.
I concur that it’s rubbish and used almost always in a manner that reeks of illegitimacy.
That's not quite what it means. Legitimate interest is a term from the GDPR, and is one of the legal bases on which a company may process your personal data. Essentially the company has a "legitimate interest" (i.e. reasonable purpose) for which your data must be processed.
Typical examples of legitimate interest are: fraud prevention, direct marketing, or ensuring network/information security of their IT infrastructure.
The rest of your comment is essentially correct though. Notably, the examples above are not exhaustive: legitimate interest is fairly vaguely defined. And there is a process in the GDPR to object to your legitimate interest claim. This has resulted in essentially all data collection companies claiming a generic legitimate interest on your data, and it's up to you to object to all of them individually. This undermines the general "you must opt in to tracking" principles of the GDPR, but until privacy agencies of the EU get around to some enforcement that's how it is.