But that’s the whole thing; there needs to be a balance between users - who are largely customers or the product or an hybrid of both- and commercial interests otherwise there won’t be a lot of product / experience to be enjoyed. My personal take on the topic is that transparency is where it’s at. Knowing exactly wtf a company is doing with my data worries me much more - I can choose to be part of the game knowingly or skip if I don’t want some processing to happen. That they claim legitimate interest or not I couldn’t care less.

Yeah some of those are very atrocious and would absolutely not sustain an objective review. At any rate anything that gets money to a company in the broadest sense is vital to it soooo….

Yeah but at the same time smaller companies generally don’t see privacy authorities barging in like in larger ones ;-) Also by following the gdpr tracker one can see what’s generally acceptable and align rather easily.

It’s much broader than that and generally an organisation can do a balance of interest assessment and decide that a processing activity falls under legitimate interests… kind of like giving the monkey the key to the banana storage…