Here is my Gravatar card as an iFrame:

I used a width=”415″ height=”328″ for this.

When we visit websites that allows us to comment or gives Likes, such as this one, then your Gravatar icon will be visible and if someone else hovers over it, this artist card will be shown. It’s just a nice way of presenting yourself online.

Big Side Note

Then there’s the sidenote about privacy.

Gravatar itself is managed by the same company as WordPress, Automattic, so you would expect it to be Open Source, but mind you, it is not, which means that what really happens inside that piece of software when we use it is not transparent, and you don’t want your identity card, that pops up everywhere, stored in a central proprietary system, feeding that system with every website you visit. Websites that have this feature plugged in are enabling big data collection by God knows who. Hence my advice to create our digital identities on Libravatar, which is a good Open Source alternative. But …

If your site uses Gravatar or Libravatar, reportedly the visitors to your website can be tracked by these identity providers. Furthermore, this blog dated 15 Feb. 2016, tells us 9 years ago that Gravatar is using (and still is) a technique that gives an opening to hackers for finding your email address. Of course this is a choice: do you want to be able to say hello on your favourite artist’s website or not? If not, stay away from things like Gravatar. If you choose to use it, use a disposable email address for it and log out after you’ve commented. Use a picture as gravatar and when that appears on a website, you know that you are logged in (and being tracked). Website owners best avoid Gravatar and use the more robust and transparent tool Libravatar.