It's an interesting post. Each country has special rules about how the user's email address is used. In Netherlands for example you can't use a shopper's email address to send them advertisements and offers unless they explicitly approve so.

Yeah this is a little weird.

But the weirdest part to me is that the author went to their website to buy one but wasn't expecting to have to enter his credit card info.

yeah if there was a checkbox right under the email field that said "remind me" or something like that, it would be OK. It's kinda scary that a few keystrokes are aggressively saved for advertisement purpose.

Yeah, and many other companies. See: http://customer.io/ (funny how that is included in the poster's screenshot).

Most TOS state something to the effect of any data the visitor enters, types, or submits is fair game.

I don't think there is anything wrong with this approach and will likely use this type of solution to aid in conversions on my sites. With 40+ percent of users exiting half-way through a form I think this is good business. So long as the initial email includes an unsubscribe.