Glide can now generate virtual email addresses for users of your app—users sign in normally, and developers never see their real email. This protects user privacy and minimizes the sharing of personal info.
This won’t affect existing user emails but will create an anonymous email for any new users that sign up.
Nice! A couple questions…
— Does this option get locked in once it’s selected? If not, are user-specific entries messed up if the option is turned off/on after the app is already in development?
— Are end users given any indication that this option is selected by the developer, or is it up to the developer to add something in the app to indicate this?
— if this is used, what happens when an Action Text component is added that sends email to a user? Is it affected at all?
This 
I’d imagine you would still have to acquire an actual email address if you need it for any additional functionality like sending emails. Just like you have to acquire name and image through onboarding for user profiles. I guess I see this feature as more of an anonymizer so a user can at least sign in without having to share any personal information if it’s not required to use the app.
??? Just a guess and I don’t know for sure ???
— Does this option get locked in once it’s selected? If not, are user-specific entries messed up if the option is turned off/on after the app is already in development?
No, it’s not locked in, you can switch back and forth. Real and anonymous email addresses can coexist in the same app. If you turn this feature on or off, the email addresses in your spreadsheet won’t change - real email addresses will remain real and anonymous ones anonymous. User-specific data is bound to the row ID, which also doesn’t change, so it’ll keep working.
— Are end users given any indication that this option is selected by the developer, or is it up to the developer to add something in the app to indicate this?
No, there’s no indication to app users.
— if this is used, what happens when an Action Text component is added that sends email to a user? Is it affected at all?
This won’t work for the time being, since we don’t forward emails to anonymous email addresses. We will add that feature later.
Thanks for the responses @Mark. Very helpful!
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your answer in this thread. Do you know if it has since changed, so that it is now possible to email users who logs in anonymously?
Thanks,
Daniel
I don’t think it’s a feature as of now. I wouldn’t bank on it becoming a feature in the future also.
It’s intended to be a privacy feature, so if you are able to send an email to the user, and the user can reply back to you, there has to be some sort of integration so that the replying email doesn’t show the user’s real email. I don’t think that mapping is easy at all.
Just curious, when using this feature, how does the glide app know that a user already exists when they log into an app on a new device?
Is the anonymized email connected to the real email hidden in the background? Cookie? Something else?
It’s internally tracked. Glide stores the real email somewhere on their system, but only writes the anonymous email to the tables. If you sign into an app that has email anonymization turned on, you will still see your real email on the user profile screen, even though it’s the anonymous email stored in the table.
Great, thanks! Sounds like if emails are the only personal data that I would want to protect, using the anonymous emails option would allow me to not have to use a separate public profiles table!
