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I was emailed after abandoning a registration form. I did not click Submit
- luord 6y agoThis is the opposite of fighting for the users. It's outright hostile.
- stillbourne 6y agoI implemented something like this for the uni I worked for a few years ago, basically we wanted to collect 'partials' as we called them. We were paying for web campaigns and we wanted to increase lead intake by collecting information as fields were filled out. We attached this to a cookie that we assigned on user landing and as they typed in the input it was progressively building a profile. If you never clicked submit it was not considered a full lead and ended up in a partials database that got mined by the analytics group. Modern CMS's, specifically SiteCore have this kind of progressive profiling built in. It was one of the selling points for why we adopted it in our last rewrite.
- Traster 6y agoWhat a great explanation of GDPR and why its necessary.
- threatofrain 6y agoOne thing I don't think people realize is in the age of async JS, even not doing anything is an action to be observed. Information is not sent when you say "okay" -- it's always being sent.
- michaelmior 6y agoRather, information can always be sent. I think it's safe to say that collecting information from a form that was not submitted is a dark pattern. Of course, browsers should keep doing what they can to prevent things like this but it's challenging without blocking legitimate use cases.
- harry8 6y agoCan we get a better name than "dark pattern" please? Something like "fraudulent practise" or "criminal process" seems to capture the essence of the thing more accurately. I'm sure we can do better than those too.
- chrismcb 6y agoWhy? Dark pattern expresses the issue fairly well. It encompass things that aren't necessarily criminal or fraudulent.
- TheRealPomax 6y agoExcept this kind of behaviour is neither fraudulent or criminal. Plus, unlike "dark pattern", those words have legal-repercussive meaning, so wanting to subvert those to mean something they don't is arguably much worse than not liking "dark pattern".
- techlaw 6y ago... well, it is not consensual (which is not to say that a court might find otherwise) because consent requires, among other things, an understanding by the grantor of what the granted permission entails. Here, it is unlikely that a user who has yet to click 'submit' understands that merely entering data (but not submitting it) is actually submitting that data. WHAT IF for the sake of argument, a user typed (but did not submit) data which could get them in trouble if shared? (defamatory or trade secret info are just two examples) And again -- a court might find otherwise -- but this behavior as presented is absolutely not consensual.
- TheRealPomax 6y agoNo it doesn't, there are tons of countries, and plenty of US states, with single-party-consent laws. Just like everything about a phone call can be recorded if a single part to the call consents (which is true by default because the recording party counts as a consenting party), everything about website interaction can be recorded for as long as someone is "doing things" on that website if whoever owns the website is okay with that (which we can be pretty sure of they are). That might sound horrible, and it is, but it's also entirely legal in many, many jurisdictions.
- umvi 6y agoIndeed one time I put something in my cart (I think it was VMWare Player) and then visited the checkout page and got distracted. When I revisited the tab, there was a dialogue open offering a discount. The page thought I was hemming and hawing on whether to buy it and then offered a discount to help push me over the edge.
- shmoogy 6y agoIt was likely when your mouse left the window boundary - we use that mechanism on our exit popups. It's super effective, I fucking hate those, but the conversion rate increase is noticeable.
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoEtsy does this too, albeit in a more sophisticated way, if you are logged in and abandon your cart within 12-24h there's a high chance you get an email offering you a 5-15% discount code for that product.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoSo in the screenshot you're giving an email and they're just storing it without telling you before you click submit, but that AddShoppers system sounds ridiculous. I'm guessing they just provide the data and you send the emails through your own account and take the inevitable reputation hit of endless spam reports yourself after you email people who've never given you their email?
- heshiebee 6y agoExactly.
- LorenPechtel 6y agoIf I abandon a cart there's a reason! Nagging me about it isn't going to make me purchase anything. You may think it did because I come back--but if that happened it's because I was after some other information first.
- privong 6y ago> Nagging me about it isn't going to make me purchase anything. I wonder about this. I feel the same, but wonder if it's true for everyone? I kinda assume it must work some of the time, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
- notahacker 6y agoSome of the time the 'reason' is going to be as simple as the browser crashed or aww someone sent me cute kittens. Or even then there was this other option but now I come to think of it that one was the best... Probably these scenarios occur far more regularly than somebody rules out buying from a store solely because they received a marketing email concerning an earlier order they abandoned.
- finaliteration 6y agoAs someone with a mild form of ADHD and a kid who likes to chat my ear off, I can’t count the number of times I’ve placed something in a cart on my phone, went to check out, and then got distracted or pulled into something else, only to return because I got the “abandonment” email that reminded me of what I was doing.
- maerF0x0 6y agooften times they will nag w/ an incentive. I recently got one from MealSquares offering 10% off my abandoned cart This maybe the next level wikibuy/honey ... Intentionally abandon carts to get more % off to undermine companies that do stupid things to get customers.
- dheera 6y ago
- reaperducer 6y agoThis has happened to me several times since the quarantine started and I began shopping online more. Nothing makes me want to shop with your company less than blatantly violating my trust before I'm even a customer.
- jasonlotito 6y agoI'll be upfront about this. I was doing this back in 2003. My rationale? People would forget to complete signups, or they get interrupted. My goal was to make it as trouble-free as possible to get back to where they had left off. And it worked really well. Granted, all this was back long before I really had any concept of spam and privacy. It was just an honest "Oh, this could help those users!" Obviously times are different and expectations have changed. I wouldn't think of doing it now.
- ykevinator 6y agoI hope you and your wife found a good breast pump
- esaym 6y agoThis happens everywhere. Since ebay has started charging tax for all items (regardless of whether or not they are used or new) in my state, I've been using more and more small online shops for product purchases. In many cases you have to fill out your address and email info before you can get to a shipping page to see shipping charges. In so many cases, even though I did not place an order or create an account, I am still sent an email saying that I have contents in my "shopping cart" and they are looking forward to "making me a satisfied customer".
- justinclift 6y agoYeah, Shopify does this too. If you leave items in a cart and they have your real email address, they'll email you some time later (that day) to "remind" you to complete the purchase. Guessing all of the shops that implement Shopify automatically pick up the behaviour.
- chrismcb 6y agoWhat does new or used have to do with anything? Don't blame eBay, they are just following the law.
- esaym 6y agoBeats the heck out of me. But sales tax, at least in the beginning, was a way to generate state revenue for the sale of new items. It had no baring for private sales between two persons for a used item which already had its tax paid when it was originally bought.
- replyifuagree 6y agoI remember reading a marketing tips page that recommended gathering the email as the first step of a multi-step signup process. I never followed the advice as I was just more interested in the technical details of connecting UI to my backend schema in a rational fashion.
- ck2 6y agoThis happens to me with shopping carts that I never register for but started to enter email. You get a "left something in your cart" discount code. So I've started to do that on purpose when I can't find a discount for a site, works about 50% of the time. Start to checkout, enter email, get to payment and just close tab. Wait an hour or two.
- filvdg 6y agoThis is so against the basics of GDPR, all these webshops that participate risk fines for non compliance from the moment a EU citizen is being tracked. Even if these are US companies they need to comply
- dheera 6y ago> Even if these are US companies they need to comply Only if you have an office in the EU. Not any more than US companies need to comply with arbitrary Chinese laws, or Japanese companies need to comply with arbitrary Saudi Arabian laws. Why does the EU have special status in being able to impose laws on the US? The EU can feel free to block the website if they don't like it. (But we know their citizens would throw a riot if they started censoring the internet, sshhh...) However, independently of GDPR, I agree that it's wrong and that you shouldn't be saving contact information by deception. You'd lose me as a customer if you did that.
- Nursie 6y agoI think it goes further than office location, if you do business in the EU at all you want to watch out. Of course the main problem with the GDPR is that it's so far not really been enforced, so people feel free to contravene it at will.
- dheera 6y agoI suppose you could also decide to either - (a) not do business in the EU, but leave your website accessible throughout the world. It's upto the EU to block it if they hate it - (b) invite people from the EU to do business with you on US soil, where they would be subject to US laws instead of EU laws
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Nextgrid 6y agoI experienced this kind of behavior from a UK-based company. This wasn't even necessary, because I already bought something pricey from them and just tried the checkout flow again just to show my friend the shipping prices. I complained to their data protection officer, who basically fobbed me off and told me they did nothing wrong. A few months down the line I finally found the time to recap everything and collect the proof and complaint to the ICO? Their response? They threw the complaint away on a technicality because it's been more than 3 (or 6, can't remember) months since my last contact with the company despite them persisting with the behavior.
- reggieband 6y agoIf he thinks that is nefarious wait until he learns that websites were using visually hidden fields to surreptitiously capture browser auto-complete details. That is, if you auto complete "name" they might have an "email", "phone number", "address", etc. field hidden from your view that also get auto filled. I sure hope that browser makers have patched that somehow but I still avoid auto-complete whenever possible.
- mfontani 6y agoI _hate_ that browsers auto-complete hidden fields for a different reason: using a hidden "telephone" or "phone" field was a low-effort but quite reliable method to weed bots from users... as users wouldn't fill a hidden field - only bots would. Enter autocomplete completing hidden fields :/
- Zhenya 6y agoIs there a place where I can learn more about this? Clever and scary.
- thedirt0115 6y agoDemo + discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13329525
- Zhenya 6y agoYou rock. A genuine thank you and an upvote
- neurostimulant 6y agoAlso, session replay is actually pretty common when the webmaster want to see how the visitors use their website. It basically capture everything including mouse movements, page scroll and form states.
- afiori 6y agoFor this I absolutely hate firefox master password feature. Every once in a while you get prompted to insert your password without any kind of indication of why, which tabs prompted it, what domain is asking, or even whether it is just firefox periodic syncing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jugg1es 6y agoHow is this any different than sites that track what people are highlighting in the text? If anything, tracking what you highlight is a worse violation because it can reveal your inner thoughts and values, which is more valuable and harder to get than your email address.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI knew a guy that started to fill out a shop form (card entry), and didn't submit. They charged the card anyway (and did not send any product). They got an earful from him. I suspect their form was a piece of junk, but that doesn't sound particularly PCI-compliant, to me. This ad-targeting, email-harvesting thing is really bad, though. It may not be illegal in most of the US (but I'll bet it is in some states), but I will lay odds that this company had better make sure they don't have any EU data mixed into their little bouillabaisse.
- heshiebee 6y agoThat’s really crazy. It’s theft and should be prosecuted as such.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoYup. He said that they probably weren't malicious about it, but hired a really shitty Web designer. They got all cooperative when he said his next call would be the local FBI office.
- dna_polymerase 6y agoI got a SMS the other day of an incomplete form in a Shopify shop. The service is called SMSBump. I do not even recall giving them my number but maybe my password manager did autofill it.
- beh9540 6y agoI argued against this pattern and left shortly after the owner of a company I worked at made me implement this pattern. As the head of the department I actually refused, but he went to one of the engineers on my team and had the push the change. I can never figure out why people don't realize that even if it's legal, it comes across as creepy.
- karatestomp 6y agoThere are analytics tools that are in pretty common use that record entire user sessions on your site. Mouse movements, stuff typed in but not submitted, everything. Javascript with more than about 1% its current capabilities, in a hyper-text document navigator and e-commerce platform, is a security hole. It can't be fixed because its features are security holes.
- tylermac1 6y agoI visited Jabra's website the other day, browsed a couple product pages and then left. Sure enough about 24 hours late I get an email with a subject like "Come check out some of these products you missed." How the hell is that legal?
- dgudkov 6y agoOnce I had a call with company called ZoomInfo. This is exactly what they pitched to me - obtaining emails of our website visitors. Creepy AF, but I can easily see why many companies would trade some creepiness in exchange for a revenue hike. We all definitely underestimate how far marketing surveillance has gone.
- stavrus 6y agoIt seems a lot of people are missing the true concern here because they only read the first half of the article. Going to paraphrase the article a bit here but yes, the website is capturing the filled-in data even if the user hasn't hit the submit button. However, they're also running a tracking script from an advertisement network in the background that attempts to capture your e-mail. If you visit Site A as a result of one of the ads from that network, but leave without putting down your e-mail address, and then go to Site B and do leave your e-mail address, the ad network will send your e-mail address to Site A in an attempt to "re-capture" that lost impression for Site A even if you never even hit submit on Site B. They're marketing it as a way of reducing ad-spend because you don't have to keep trying to target potential customers who've already shown interest through more ads. I'm not a lawyer so I'm very curious to know how this doesn't easily violate COPPA for Site A, Site B, and the ad network, among other privacy laws. The wording from the ad network shown in the article is a bit vague around enabling a "triggered email sequence", so I'm wondering if they get around some legal issues by sending emails for Site A on their behalf rather than sharing the email address itself. * Edited for minor typos I noticed after hitting submit.
- heshiebee 6y agoThis is the text from the email footer, they call themselves safeOpt, it's part of addshoppers.com: THIS IS A THIRD PARTY ADVERTISEMENT This email was sent to @gmail.com on 2020-05-16 23:06:22.669518 (UTC). If you no longer wish to receive Aeroflow Breastpumps communications via SafeOptⓇ, please unsubscribe here.
- bitshaker 6y agoFormstack.com forms are able to do this and they are distributed all over the web.
- theartfuldodger 6y agoI run this on my forms. I include a hard to follow disclaimer that says your entries are saved in real time "for your convenience" It freaks people out when we reach out on the partial fill, but since I sell lead generation, it's a nice trick that they appreciate. It's definitely problematic. Luckily, our time is costly so only one single follow up occurs ..no list selling, mailing lists or repeat calls occur, but would be easy to do. Its actually just an available feature on existing form software
- ta17711771 6y ago> I include a hard to follow disclaimer Casual scum is casual.
- thelandofrandom 6y agoDang. This is a next level dark pattern. I thought a email form without a consent box was bad!
- anewdirection 6y agoAll the marketing drones in this thread excusing their actions because 'abandoned cart turnover is real' make me sick. Thats all. I have nothing else to add. Shame on you and your shady employers.
- barbarbar 6y agoSo I suppose the advice of disabling Javascript is not that bad after all.