How is that supposed to help Drac? I am using www

Then type in the www address.

> They don't share your actual email address to gravatar, so there is no breach of data protection.

what I meant is, to set up your own gravatar you have to go to their site to upload the pic and supply your own email to identify yourself to them

Yep, so if you want to have a gravatar then the price you pay for getting server space and bandwidth from them is that you supply them with your email address. (Same with flickr, Picasa etc)

I was trying to answer these concerns:

wwaswas – Member
mmm, so does this mean that stw have given gravatar my email address to generate this thing?
I don't recall giving them permission to do that.

MilitantGraham – Member
What's Gravatar ?
Why do they want my email address ?

To which (as I understand it) the answers are: STW haven't given gravatar your email address. You can opt to do that yourself and it will allow you to upload your own pic if you do. If you don't then that is fine.

I have it now – STW sends the hashed email to gravatar with ?d=wavatar on the end, which generates a pseudo-random pic like these if that email does not have a user-uploaded image:

it is extremely difficult to get back from the hash to your email address – as explained on gravatar's site if you're interested

more here