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.
This is a provision of the article 6 of the GDPR, which describes very broadly that you have to justify your legitimate interest with a fair reason to process user data. It is mostly there to allow for IT security, fraud prevention, but also marketing.
Unfortunately, the way the regulation is written is quite imprecise and subject to interpretation. You can read this page, it will give you an insight on the possible interpretations:
https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/legitimate-interest/
My understanding is that you have the choice between the following modes :