In the past, I have mentioned some concerns about Gravatar. As WesternMA points out, Gravatar is the only third-party that has visibility to visitors of this website, and only within the blog pages.<\/p>\n
Gravatar is owned by WordPress, the open-source software company that created the software used by this blog. The purpose of Gravatar is the randomized icons by each user that makes it easier to see which comment came from which user. In addition, registered users like me can create a custom icon that reflects my personality.<\/p>\n
What this means is that when any person visits any page, my blog server sends the email address of each commentator to Gravatar in order to see if the commenter has a custom avatar. If WordPress wanted, that is an enormously powerful bit of information. It not only tells them what pages you reviewed and when, it also shows the relationships of the other people who read the same blog post and commented on it. Even if you don’t register with Gravatar and never comment on the blog, if you read multiple blogs that use Gravatar, then Gravatar would know the list of blogs that you read – even if they don’t know who you are.<\/p>\n
If I was using their anti-spam product (which I am not), the same would be true that word press would see every single comment in real time, even if the blog was private.<\/p>\n
Since WordPress is open source and plug-ins are written by many different people, without personally reviewing all of the code, I have to trust that WordPress is not deliberately gathering and leaking information to third parties \u2013 but I would be surprised if they don’t. If you read their privacy policy, it says that they will provide information only if a government agency asked for it. That basically says there is no privacy, and no requirement of a legal demand before they would voluntarily provide information if they feel that doing so furthers “the public interest”.<\/p>\n
The question on the floor is \u2013 should I turn off Gravatar? I could try turning it off for a week and see if it matters to anybody whether there are avatars or not. <\/p>\n
Opinions?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the past, I have mentioned some concerns about Gravatar. As WesternMA points out, Gravatar is the only third-party that has visibility to visitors of this website, and only within the blog pages. Gravatar is owned by WordPress, the open-source … Continue reading