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This seems kind of like privacy theatre to me. What's to stop someone from just cloning your repos and deriving your email from the commit attributes?
by stormbrew 13y ago
This seems kind of like privacy theatre to me. What's to stop someone from just cloning your repos and deriving your email from the commit attributes?
- absherwin 13y agoAbsolutely nothing. According to the linked help page, a fake email address must be provided to git config. They'd need a separate copy of the repo with the blinded email address for public access. It's not hard to do but I imagine it would bother repo maintainers that an individual user could cause different repos to be served. Of course, everyone could just decide that email in commits isn't worth the privacy risk. It's a trade-off. For the curious: Downloading all the repos and extracting email addresses takes 1-2 days and costs <$50 on AWS.
- technoweenie 13y agoYou don't need a valid email to commit to your repositories, but you do need one to use GitHub notifications. This feature makes it possible to use the web editor with a fake email address instead of your notifications email address.
- danielweber 13y agoI use fake email addresses on all my git contributions.
- plorkyeran 13y agoThe actual commits will have the fake address. The change isn't that they're hiding the email addresses in the UI; it's that they've added the option to use a fake email address for commits made via the web UI while still receiving notification emails from Github.
- csense 13y agoNothing. Which is why I use a fake email in my commits.