Second DI Day: From Gravatar to Libravatar

Second DI Day in the still young year of 2026.1 This time I parted ways with another US-based service: Automattic. Not a Big Tech giant, but still highly relevant on the web. It is the company behind the well-known site builder WordPress and the Gravatar service.2 For nearly 18 years, one of my photos has been tied to my email address across countless forums and websites through Gravatar. Looking back, that feels like a relic from a more naive phase of the internet, when the idea was to put a face to a name in chats and forums. In the age of surveillance capitalism,3 AI-generated images, and fake identities, that original purpose has largely disappeared. If anything, it has become a disadvantage to lose control over your own image online. Even if someone only uses an avatar, a centralized US provider can still track where and when that avatar is requested. Automattic’s terms explicitly allow broad data sharing with third parties:4 Read more