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.
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.