[mattkevan]

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.

[jklinger410]

> 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.

[mattkevan]

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.

[rmbyrro]

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?

[kingcharles]

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.