I find it incredible that they are bold enough to try to pass this as legitimate interest when the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is currently neck deep with the Belgian DPA over that very matter.
Legitimate Interest is supposed to be used for thinks like fraud prevention, not for added value things like highly target advertising that requires building a profile of a user.
I agree. From reading the text it appears legitimate interests was not intended to cover tracking for advertising purposes. However some government implementations specifically talk about it as likely allowed (uk) and in practice it seems to be on all the ridiculous popups now. If it is allowed for this expanded scope it completely defangs a lot of the gdpr.
I think some major differences between Meta and IAB is that IAB was sharing the data with other companies where Meta keeps your data to themselves. Additionally as a part of personalizing the non ad posts on ones feed the data is already being collected and processed. Showing a relevant ad isn't much different privacy wise than showing a relevant post. Tracking how you interact with a post isn't much different from tracking how you interact with an ad post.
This is a completely circular argument which also happens to completely miss the point.
1. They want to show personalized adverts
2. So they collect and process the data to do so
3. And therefore because they've collected the data, they must be allowed to show personalized adverts.
Aside from it being complete nonsense, the contention is around the 2nd point. They should NOT be allowed to collect and process the data for that purpose without permission, which EU courts have repeatedly stated.
Legitimate Interest is supposed to be used for thinks like fraud prevention, not for added value things like highly target advertising that requires building a profile of a user.
I don’t think it’s going to end well for Meta.