Is Gravatar a privacy risk? WT*

I realize these posts are quite old, but I have been dismayed at the level of paranoia shown by some of the posters on this and similar threads.

Surely, in this day and age the cautious consciously obtains / maintains a few email accounts which matter little and are serviced even less... Just for all those mostly sign up and forget situations. So who cares if someone without a life and with huge amounts of computer power (and hacker software) eventually figures out an address from an hash.

If the name part of the free (probably) mail account(s) is mostly gobbledygook then that makes hash parsing / matching even harder. And if you use simple, real words, names or numbers for passwords to boot you have to accept you are really stupid.

But at the end of the day, a lot more worrisome for the paranoid (and so called "lawyers" with a bone to pick) are the plethora of form submission checks (AKA like excellent "aKismet") and general RBL access blockers / redirects used (quite rightly so) on so many web sites you won't even know about unless you are actually a spammer of various sorts.

All those rely on and receive our email addresses and IP addresses of which they wholly or in part rely on. Is an upfront service like Gravatar to be trusted less when those others could track FAR more than a few sites here and there displaying an avatar pic. I think not.

And while we're at it, get the Ghostery add-on for your browser and see just how many months it can take to get on top of (blocking) the huge amount of third-party tracking cookies we are barraged with. That's really scary too.

Discovery of a mere email address one consciously supplies has nothing on all those occurrences I mentioned, any of which if harvested can also be packaged for others at a profit. Any monetized site especially SHOULD declare it all in a readily accessed privacy declaration; does yours?