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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Very nice product!

That said,

> Partial submissions

> Collect answers from people who filled in a part of your form, but didn’t click the submit button. Capture data from lost leads, find drop off points and improve your conversion rates.

From a user point of view, I really hate this. I’d say collecting data about drop off points is fine, but secretly collecting answers not intended for submission is a dark pattern that violates an implicit social contract and users’ privacy. Hell, people often accidentally paste in private stuff, including passwords.

I can understand that as a form builder product you probably need to offer this feature or lose customers. Add this to the long list of depressing “features” of the modern web.

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This is a terrible idea - the data isn’t yours until it’s been explicitly given.

A few years ago I was the UX lead at a big uk website. At the time, the commercial team were wanting to steal unsubmitted personal data from forms and just couldn’t grasp why it was so wrong.

I’d been fighting them on it for ages, but thankfully a few other large sites got into trouble for doing it and I was able to convince the business that the reputational damage wasn’t worth whatever value we might glean from it. Our users were savvy, privacy conscious and extremely vocal and would have gone mental if it came out we were doing it too.

Couldn’t believe it was even a conversation I needed to have.

> This is a terrible idea - the data isn’t yours until it’s been explicitly given.

I couldn't disagree more. I think the owner of a website should be able to track whatever information they please about your session.

It’s one thing to track how users are using forms and seeing where they drop out, for example on a checkout. It’s another thing entirely to save the data from those fields.

Collecting personally identifying information without explicit consent seems like a great way to get into trouble. Implied consent is no consent at all.

Would you also support Wallmart following you around their store, keeping track of which isles you walked, which way you looked, conversations you had with your spouse next to you as you shopped, etc?

It's their store. They should be entitled to own everything about you when you walk into their store, right?

I mean, Walmart almost certainly do track everyone's movement around their stores to see how to improve their conversion rates.

When I worked for UK financial company we would track how far people were going through our form wizard to see where the paint points were. The personal information never left the web page, but it would report back telemetry telling us how many people dropped out at each stage. That helped us to do split testing, e.g. does this label make more people fill out the form, etc.

+1. Collecting personal information such as real names, payments, phone numbers, etc. on users without their explicit consent (hitting a submit button) is absolutely unethical.

just add, "anything you type into our forms may be captured". explicit consent, one and done

I don't think that would qualify as explicit consent. According to GDPR consent would have to be: "freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her."

How could "anything you type into our forms may be captured" be construed as a clear affirmative action by the person entering data into the form that has a submit button for submitting the data?

Also, to make it unambiguous and informed, it would at least have to be a very-very obvious statement, which would make it useless for the sneaky purposes, wouldn't it?

Edit: I know it's not only GDPR that is being discussed, but I think would follow the same definition.

Yea unfortunately I agree and stops me using it at least in a corporate capacity which would have been a paid for account.

May use for personal use though, for free.

Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll block Tally using uBlock.

I'm not sure I understand here this issue. When I'm using typeform, and I click "next" or scroll to the next question, I've always assumed that has meant "submit this answer".

I don't consider the entire thing a form, and at some point I may go "ok, I'm done answering your questions, I don't want to do this anymore", and I leave. I don't assume at that point that nothing has happened. I answered a bunch of questions and gave you the data.

Do other people really look at this UI as if it was a single form, rather than a submit per entry?

I agree with you, that's how I viewed it. I've distributed typeform in the past and thought it would have been nice and acceptable to record partial answers given that each step feels like a submission; kind of like if I enter my shipping address in step 1 of a checkout process, it is stored once I move to the billing address in step 2.

> Do other people really look at this UI as if it was a single form, rather than a submit per entry?

I don't understand why you would necessarily think that. The forms can be styled to look like regular forms, with multiple fields per page.

E.g. this registration form: https://tally.so/create?templateId=ywaZnM

I took the above warning as saying that if I type my first name in the first field, then change my mind and go away without submitting anything, then they record my first name.

My actions (leaving after I typed in something, without hitting submit) would in no way look like I intended to submit an entry.

While I think your expectation that there are other forms that do this is possibly valid, I don't think that many other forms I encounter every day do do this, and I would be grossed out if they did.

I do agree with your point. It was a highly requested feature, indeed. It's available only with our Pro plan, so it's not widely available to everyone.

Maybe I misread the OP, but I took their point to be that the feature "violates [...] user's privacy."

To say you agree, but it's OK because people pay you for it suggests that you don't really agree.

That wasn't my point. I meant the feature is available to a very small subset of our users. Then even a smaller subset chooses to use it and I believe, it's up to the form creator to add a disclaimer on why this is necessary for their use case.

I'm not usually a big privacy person, but the way you're responding to this is a dealbreaker. This feature is fundamentally unethical. The fact that it's paywalled and not everyone uses it changes nothing.

How do you know it's not going to be used after the user explicitly accepts sharing data?

> This feature is fundamentally unethical

Consider an implementation of "draft" submissions. Imagine you wanted to implement such a feature on top of some form builder. You would require such a feature.

I don't necessarily agree or disagree with the points raised on ethics here, but there's a very real consideration when you're offering a library/package/feature, sometimes you have to expose guts that can be used improperly in order to enable certain featuresets. I think it's obvious why someone building such a tool as OP would offer such a feature as is in discussion, because they would lose money otherwise from implementations that require this feature.

So, if a subset of things that can be done with your work are nefarious, how much effort are you meant to put in to make it ethical to sell your work? Is it inherently always unethical to build a tool which can be used to nefarious ends?

You can build anything you want after acquiring the end user's informed consent.

A user knows what a draft is, and would agree to such a feature upon pressing a button that indicates that the draft will be saved for later by submitting the form verbatim as-is to the server

Saving everything a user types in, without a user's informed consent, is a severe trust violation.

Well, that was a ridiculously non-general treatment of my attempt to lift this question to an actual abstraction.

Again, OP isn't selling things directly to end-users, so I don't know how the OP is meant to acquire the end user's consent, informed or not. The OP is exposing abilities in a tool which enables his end users to turn around and deliver something to their end users. My question is how culpable OP is for abuse of his tool's abilities, and what level he must go thru to put abuse protections in place to be not morally culpable for his end user's treatment of their end user's, and your answer is "OP needs to get informed consent". Ridiculously simplified.

> OP isn't selling things directly to end-users

That's ridiculous. If you provide a whitelabel solution, you simply add consent checkboxes and and explanatory text, the same way shop systems and virtually all other whitelabel software meant to be embedded works.

> how culpable OP is for abuse of his tool's abilities

Regulators don't care where you sourced the software from that you provided. You provide it, you host it, you're culpable.

The people filling the forms aren't the people paying the bills, so their opinions on the matter are moot. The actual customers want the feature, so it would be silly to not offer it and leave money on the table.

Sorry but that makes it even worse. You can't just push ethical decisions to your customers. You are the one building the product and you are the one defining the ethical boundaries within which it can be used by your customers. As technology builders we are at forefront of pushing all kind of societal boundaries and often end up redefining them in the process. As technology moves so fast it can take years for society to catch up and decide that something definitely was a bad idea but by that time it's often too late. No one wants to be the engineer realising years later that what their build was harmful to society, so try be more conscious of the decisions you take. One good framework to reason about the impact of what we build is to simply ask ourselves if there would be any negative long term effects to society of a billion people would use the feature. Right now from your perspective that seems far away and unlikely but in our field this happens all the time, either through scaling or others copying you.

So either put a big disclaimer yourself at which point no one will probably want to enable it anymore except for edge use cases (which hopefully are ethical even though I can't really think of one right now) or just remove it fully. It's a huge breach of privacy and most customers who have issues with drop rates probably should redesign their form and CTA. Unless the reason for people dropping of is that they're doing something sketchy and/or asking for way too much personal information of course, which is exactly the case where I absolutely do not want to have that data nor would I consent to them collecting it before I click submit.

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