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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Users expect forms to submit when the click the button. If they change their mind about signing up or purchasing something, they don't expect to get emailed if they didn't click the button. That's the dark pattern. Not the worst I've seen, but not great either.

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Exactly. I've been a victim of a dark pattern like this years ago when I was trying to find mortgage rates.

Many of the online mortgage rate tools are really just lead generation sites, including some of the big name brand ones.

One wanted me to create an account, and I got about half way through (I stupidly gave my phone number) and then exited without creating account. I believe they had a sort of "enter email, next. enter phone, next" kind of page by page pattern.

Anyway, within an hour of exiting I was getting 3 phone calls per hour from mortgage companies soliciting me for business.

"abandoned cart" technology is why many ecommerce websites ask for your email first when checking out. My kid recently added some items to an online shopping cart to determine shipping rates, which required their email, and now they get spammed incessantly.

Switching to FastMail and the easy availability of arbitrary-business-name@mydomain.com was worth it just for that.

But how many people enter their full email and then back out of the form? This seems like a small thing at the end of the day, especially for 3 emails that doubtless contain an unsubscribe link.

Edit: That got a lot of push back. I'm just saying, this is not the hill I'd die on. At best it would spare some small single digit percent of visitors 3 unwanted emails.

I’m sure you meant your question sincerely. FWIW, I have backed out of many signup forms, and often wondered/worried whether they were doing exactly what the OP talked about. The reason for back-outs is because there is another very common dark pattern this gets combined with: a multi-page signup where email is asked for early, and then something more onerous is requested on a later page, which is where the cancellation is much more likely to occur. The single biggest reason in my experience for late cancellation is when the signup asked for a credit card, even though the signup was advertised as free. It’s a bait and switch, and the deal ends up being a subscription that you can cancel after your first free day/week/month. I’ve had other things besides credit cards, though, like required personal information.

Yes, I can see your point. If you click through to the next step though, you should assume that submitted the form. Regardless of whether it was done through an old school POST or Ajax in a single page app.

I think it's still a dark pattern to email someone who hasn't expressed interest in receiving those emails. There should at least be text informing you of that and giving a way to opt out up front.

Yeah, exactly, it’s about expressing interest, communicating intent, and offering a way to opt out. The broader point is that form submission is not the criteria for saving an email address at all, explicit consent from the user is. When the site itself provides an expectation that a signup process can be “cancelled” they are signaling an expectation that the information will be discarded and not used to market to you or sell your email address to other companies. When they do that despite having communicated to you that the process was cancelled, they’re playing dirty. And I do think selling the email address to third parties is the bigger danger here, not getting a couple of direct marketing emails from site you visited.

And if I fill out most of the form, but some custom BS UI chunk can't play nice and borks the page... I'm done with "company", leaving the page since it never finished loading, but my email address is already saved?

Absolutely f*ing not. Not a small thing in any way. This is unethical and if I got an email from that company you can bet I'll push back.

By that logic let's monitor their clipboard for email and phone numbers. Let's tell them that they should enable notifications so we verify they're not a robot. Let's ask them to download a little executable to see if we can find helpful ways to reach them.

We'll provide an unsubscribe link, I promise.

... But let's just record they clicked unsubscribe because that means they're engaged. I mean maybe they clicked in error? Let's ask them to confirm.

... But maybe they confirmed because they were confused and didn't understand the great value we provide.

We can beat around the bush our way to full-blown scammers all day.

Saving emails from a form NOT submitted is bullshit, and you know it. The user never intended to submit.

It's not out of the form. It's out of the email fields. So if you press tab to go to the next field, the email is send somewhere without notice.

Probably an awful lot for them to want to pay a developer to do this.

Small things can still be unethical.

This is about control: does the user understand when the data leaves their hands and is given to another? If the user doesn't understand this, then they find themselves unwittingly giving out their personal information, not just to legitimate actors, but also malicious ones.

I think this is a pretty important thing to try and get right.

> But how many people enter their full email and then back out of the form?

Most people. Because we have form autofill.

In that case, why implement the feature at all?? Why die on the hill to capture email addresses from the “small single digit percent of visitors” who never consented to receive your spam in the first place?

We found a new kind of psychopathy test here.

Really?

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