Gravatar

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Gravatar is a silo service run by Automattic to host a profile photo (avatar) for e-mail addresses. The photos can then automatically be displayed on your posts and comments on any website that supports it. Some sites use the service to also provide hovercards with additional identity information.

Features

• Supports rel-me verification. See rel-me#Gravatar
• ...

Criticism

Gravatar is based on MD5 hashes of e-mail addresses, which has been used to deanonymize users in the past: [1], [2]. You're effectively leaking weakly-hashed user data.

Web3 support

In 2024, Gravatar wrote about the use of Web 3.0 and blockchain.

2024-07-30 Ronnie Burt: The Hidden Power of Decentralized Identity Systems (archived)

• 2024-07-30 Jamie Zawinski: Gravatar Dunning-Krugerrands (archived)

See Also

• profile photo
• libravatar
• webvatar
• hovercard
• Wordpress Exposé demonstrates privacy issues on wordpress sites
• Pravatar a site that generates random CC0 avatar images