[aj]

Oh I agree. There SHOULD be privacy controls.

I was only disagreeing with the OP that all contact information should be "not required" at all.

My take is: Yes, collect the contact information (and as much as feasible, ensure it is valid) but also provide options to make it private to an extent (perhaps have at least one public email (protected from spam bots obviously) while making the rest of the info private and available only through a court order etc)

As you can see, I also have extreme parentheses usage syndrome ;)