Regarding "legitimate interest" In the CJEU considered that the economic interest is legitimate (in this case the interest of a third party to obtain the personal information of a person who has damaged his property in order to sue him for damages) . It also recalls that the Article 29 Working Party had, in its opinion 06/2014 (WP 217), recalled that the concept of legitimate interests includes a "wide" range of Buy Bulk SMS Service interests, and that the freedom to exercise commercial activity, including the pursuit of "purely commercial interests such as the maximization of profits", is a human right enshrined in Article 16 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (EU Charter ). The Commission therefore considers that a strict interpretation of legitimate interest, which would in principle exclude commercial purposes, does not make it possible to find an appropriate balance between the rights in question, since the right to data protection would be systematically given priority that the interest pursued derives from freedom of enterprise.
Turning to the GDPR, the Commission also highlighted Recital 47, from which it follows that processing for direct marketing purposes can be considered to be carried out for a legitimate purpose. Regarding the necessity of the treatment and the balancing The European Commission insists on the need for a concrete balance , which excludes a rigorous approach in which the commercial purpose is presumed to be unnecessary or disproportionate. It relies in particular on cases, and C-40/17 (Fashion ID). As for the criteria to be taken into account in the balancing, they include the nature of the information in question and its sensitivity for the privacy of the person concerned. It follows from all this, according to the Commission, that it is "not possible to conclude generally that a purely commercial interest is not likely to prevail over the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject, because that must be assessed on the basis of a concrete balancing.
