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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.