I really don't like Gravatar
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Is there any way to have an avatar for one’s WordPress blog that does not mean that your blog avatar appears on every single site that you have ever commented on?
Yes, I’ve looked this up on the useless Gravatar site and on the WordPress “support” forums, and it seems not. We are burdened forever to be denied real privacy, any escape from comments we may have made years ago that are completely irrelevant to our blog subject, no ability to separate our work life from our personal interests online, no option to remain anonymous or control how information about us is aggregated.
Yet, WordPress claims to support online privacy and bangs on about supporting Edward Snowden.
This is the worst form of “surveillance” of our online presence and a much more insidious type of data gathering than anything the NSA has done.
I signed up for WordPress, not for all the other sites that Gravatar is forcing my blog identity to appear on.
This is obliging me to curtail any form of online commenting that’s unrelated to my blog.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Just to clear things up you need to know that WordPress.com and Gravatar are together forever. They are both owned by Automattic.
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In case you want to know which other service Automattic owns see here http://automattic.com/
If you want to have multiple gravatars then you can use different email addresses to register different username accounts. Every blog has a sole owner and it is the person with the username account who registered the blog under that username account ands associated email address. No matter how many blogs are created under any username account there will be only one gravatar and one primary blog that can be linked to that username.
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That’s fine. But, neither Gravatar nor WordPress are “together” with all the thousands, perhaps even millions, of other sites out there that, if you want to comment on (e.g. via Disqus or on newspaper sites) then you will find your WordPress avatar suddenly appearing.
Gravatar and WordPress have nothing to do with my email address provider, except, now, if I want to comment on something and need to register with my email address, I find my WordPress avatar and ID are published.
Is there no option to block this on non-Automattic sites? Or to disengage one’s email address?
Is there no option to be able to continue using your email address on other sites (and even WordPress ones) without your Gravatar profile always popping up?
It’s not feasible to oblige people to have several email addresses just so they can comment on other sites and not have their WordPress avatar appear.
And, where does WordPress’s professed concern for privacy fit in to all this? It’s a sham!
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