Xfce Forum

Ander111

Member

Registered: 2013-03-05

Posts: 17

This Gravatar thing...?

I've noticed we can't upload avatar images here, but must use Gravatar to link to a single image for use on multiple sites.

Gravatar's site blandly states:

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog.

Does that word follows give you the creeps, as it does me? Isn't it bad enough that companies like Google are buying up sites like YouTube and requiring you to maintain a common ID between them? Can you see the way this is all heading?

I haven't read Gravatar's privacy policy (which could change at any moment, of course), nor do I know what the potential is for their databases to be used to figure out who's who, now or in the future. Have you noticed that Gravatar.com runs on a Wordpress template, though? Not exactly confidence-inspiring, security-wise... And did you know that until just recently, the head of Automattic, the company that owns Gravatar, was a former Yahoo VP? (How do you spell "identity tracking"?)

And why would XFCE—which is part of the Linux community, and therefore, I assume, in favor of preserving our dwindling online freedoms and privacy—prefer that approach?

Is it a storage issue? What are we talking here, 1 GB or so for everybody? That seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, if you look through the forum, you'll see that, like, 2 or 3 people have jumped through the necessary hoops and are actually using these Gravatars. Everywhere else: monotonous, personality-free placeholder images.

If anyone wants to use the same avatar everywhere and be Universally Branded, that's easy enough. It can't take much more time to upload it than it does to enter a Gravatar ID.

Maybe there's some big advantage to this that I'm overlooking. Feel free to elucidate me.

Cheers, A.

Last edited by Ander111 (2014-05-05 00:13:10)

lulzicon

Member

From: The other end of the rainbow

Registered: 2014-06-10

Posts: 10

Re: This Gravatar thing...?

From what I've seen it kinda' like a blind dog following a blind man. See, don't you like mine?