alt Hacker NewsYou can’t change anything about a commit without breaking the chain of SHA hashes in the commits, which causes pulls to break.
GitHub hides the emails on their web UI, but nothing stops people from pulling the repository with a Git client and looking at the emails in the commit log after doing so.
Which is why you should be careful to never use your actual email in git commits.
When I made a patch to the Linux kernel I did have to use a real email, since you have to send to their mailing list. I used a throwaway email for it, which I have since edited on my mail server config to forward to /dev/null (yes, I'm one of the weirdos still self hosting email in 2026). The amount of spam I got was insane, and not even developer relevant spam.