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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Still wondering how "freely given, informed, specific and unambiguous" is fulfilled by "sure you can opt-out of tracking - by buying a premium subscription. Also, here are our 589 'partners' that all claim legitimate interest" but here we are.

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Legitimate interest does not exist and is a loophole in the law which should be killed. You can challenge it but the authorities who should handle that are grossly underfunded.

Legitimate interests exist, and the loophole exists because otherwise legitimate use cases like security audits or fraud detection would be impossible.

Most of EU laws are "these are sensible defaults and we expect you to behave like adults". As we've seen, digital services are anything but.

Even if they were well-funded, I suspect the history of regulatory capture, at least in the U.S., shows that meaningful pro-consumer reforms get slow-walked until the underlying bills dilute and/or die in committee.

Or, if reforms do pass, they get reversed the next time the counter-party gains enough power in Congress to roll back the progress.

It does exist, but the allowable use cases that third parties can claim "legitimate interest" for need to be severely restricted. At present, it's a joke - a single site can have dozens or even hundreds of companies claiming "legitimate" interests, but which are anything but legitimate.

It's almost hilarious how every cookie form now has a "legitimate interest" section that's just a copy of the "consent" section with defaults set to "allow".

They're not even pretending anymore and are just trying everything they can't get consent for again via the "legitimate interest" route.

I was actually wondering if the mandated "refuse everything" button that revokes my consent in bulk (and then conveniently closes the window) also implies I objected to all "legitimate interest" claims, or if that is another malicious compliance trick...

Legitimate interest does exist and is a specific purposeful provision in the law.

"legitimate interest" was supposed to be for things like remember-login cookies and the like. Not for advertisers going "my interest is legitimate because it's how I make money".

noyb calls these schemes "Pay or Okay"[0] and has filed complaints[1]. However, as far as I can tell no one has been forced by a court to stop.

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[0] https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-report-how-companies-make-you...

[1] https://noyb.eu/en/project/forced-consent-dpas-austria-belgi...

Europe doesn’t enforce the law. Cookie banners are similarly pointless.

They are useful as a deterrence system, can't decline in one click? I'm out thanks.

€6.3B cumulative fines says that they’re enforcing the law to at least some extent: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/statistics

Yet the pointless banners and illegal tracking remains. They do, sometimes, but rarely. And having Ireland's utterly toothless DPC handling so many big tech companies makes it even worse.

Yes, letting companies go regulatory agency shopping should not have been allowed. Legal disputes between companies and the customers need to be decided where the customers are.

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