srm
I saw the commentary about not keeping too much personal information. But without any e-mail addresses, how do you send notifications of activity? Without that feature, I don't imagine any future where I would use this site. It pretty much limits the utility to only those who are power users who will be checking it every single day. That's not how I use SE, and it definitely is not how I use SE at work... when I need a Stack Overflow question answered, I post it, and then I go back to work. I do not want to have to click back regularly to poll for results.
So, question: What are the plans for sending notifications if you're not allowing us to submit e-mail addresses?
Top Answer
PinoBatch
If the user has chosen to enable JavaScript, the site could offer use of the [Notifications API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notifications_API/Using_the_Notifications_API).
Answer #2
Jack Douglas
> I saw the commentary about not keeping too much personal information
It's not that we are avoiding PII, but that we don't want for *force* you to hand over anything more than the bare minimum.
> So, question: What are the plans for sending notifications if you're not allowing us to submit e-mail addresses?
Email notifications and account recovery are two reasons for having the option to add a verified email addresses to your profile.
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*update 6 Dec 2020:*
We've now implemented email notifications. It's still quite primitive and there are a number of things we'd like to refine later on, but as of now you can opt in to be notified by email whenever you get a TA notification.
* You opt in by adding an email address on your profile (and opt-out by removing it — we'll probably end up having a seperate check-box for opt-in so you can have an email just for account recovery).
* If you don't want to expose your email address you have many options. For example you can use Pushover with a custom email address for TA.
* You get email notifications for all TA notifications — there is no option yet for finer-grained control of which you have.
* It's curently a profile-wide setting for all your communities.