How would a company decide that something should be “legitimate interest” vs “consent”?
EDIT: Definition of “Legitimate Interest”, when hovering over the question mark.
How does legitimate interest work?
Some vendors are not asking for your consent, but are using your personal data on the basis of their legitimate interest.
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.
Just like adblockers, the internet has become unusable without tracker blockers like Consent-O-Matic, which automatically declines everything.
I hate having to manually deselect all of the cookies/consent toggles, just to get to the end and they have the “accept all” look like the “confirm choice”.
Omg, yes, that shit is enraging.
These days if a site does that I go elsewhere - the trouble is, I really want to shout at them to tell them why I am going somewhere else but there is rarely a useful contact to do so.
One thing I’ve found to be useful is just having my browser clear all cookies upon closing. It’s initially annoying while you set up all your exceptions for commonly used sites so you don’t need to log in again there every time, but afterwards you don’t need to worry too much, because once you close your browser, all the useless cookies are gone.