Gravatar Advisory: How to Protect Your Email Address and Identity

Gravatar is a service that provides users with a profile image that can appear on many sites across the Net. It is integrated with WordPress.com (The version of WordPress hosted by Automattic) and is also integrated into WordPress.org, the self hosted version of WordPress. Gravatar is also used by many other popular services on the web like StackOverflow.com. If you sign up for a website on WordPress.com and publish a blog post, a Gravatar icon appears on your site as your profile photo, indicated by the red arrow below. You can visit gravatar.com to customize that icon and upload a photo of your own.
If you use WordPress.org, Gravatars are an option you can enable for your users and they are widely used. It will either show their profile photo if they have gone to Gravatar.com to create one, or it will show a default image. You can select from several kinds of default images.
Other services like StackOverflow, one of the most popular sites on the web, also use Gravatar for profile images.
In the HTML source code of your website, Gravatar loads images using a hash of your email address. If you read our post earlier this week where we discuss the problem of malware scanners using weak
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13991/gravatar-advisory-how-to-protect-your-email-address-and-identity

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/gravatar-advisory-how-to-protect-your-email-address-and-identity/