Hi @turri 

The assigner (person who initiated the approval link within the playbook) will typically be notified of the approve or decline response from the designated approver.   

i) If you mean a timestamp, the product does not output this. However Approval Links are near real time (in my experience <1 second), so you could run the Action immediately after "Get Current Time" and use the output of that. 

ii) If you mean the decision that was made, that depends HOW you use approval links.  If an approval link references a single Action, then either you clicked it, or you didn't and in this case if the Action hasn't run... the user didn't click.

If you use Approval Links with a 'Multi Choice Question' then the link clicked (and therefore the answer/approval) will determine which path the Flow takes. 

HTH?

The user can still execute manually that task we want approval for. How can we prevent the user from executing it? That defeats the purpose of these approvals

I would try ssign the task to a Role with no users, so no platform users can see it