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 criteri

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.