Re: [108attendees] Meetecho participant pics

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 7/27/2020 3:07 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> On 2020-07-27, at 23:36, Robert Moskowitz <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> I am not aware of any business reason for me to get a Wordpress account.
>>
>> Ergo I will not have a gravatar.
> I think you are saying people recognizing your face is not a business reason.
>
> It sure was for me when I got my Wordpress account just for that one reason in 2008.
>
> (I think we are really debating how wise it was for the meetecho people to use Gravatar for this function.  I personally think it was brilliant, because it gave them a useful feature for very low effort [gravatar libraries abound].  But, unless you know about automattic [sic], it does trigger our paranoia reflexes; it was interesting to see the lynching mob in this thread.  And the process for getting a gravatar set up really is near-ridiculous, but then $0 is really cheap…)

I understand the push to add features and use free services. I come from
a different angle, that free services have a hidden cost in terms of
privacy. That's why I asked the question about the Gravatar business
model. From a high altitude observer, adding a Gravatar icon to a blog
or a web site has lots in common with the buttons or icons placed by
Google, Facebook, Twitter and others. These buttons allow third parties
to track who is using what site at what time, i.e., Internet Surveillance.

I read John's message stating that this is a benign service from
Wordpress, a byproduct of their need to identify posters of comments on
their blogging service. That may well be, but this is still a third
party tracker. There is nothing that technically prevent Wordpress to
change the terms and monetize the data in the future. Let's hope that
Meetecho may be able to react quickly in that case.

On the other hand, avatars do have a privacy advantage over actual
pictures. They cannot be used to train a face recognition database.

-- Christian Huitema