Do you ask for that with the awareness that gravatar then gets to track your presence around the internet for the cost of a tiny picture?
I would rather have less ad tracking pixels on someone elses websites if possible, but I am genuinely interested in the value that gravatar provides to people who like the service.
There's a lot of things that can track presence around the web and gravatar's not one of them. Iff you decide to implement gravatar without mirroring their images, avatars are indeed loaded on their first query (and not subsequent ones) and, god knows what they're doing with that information ohgod. They certainly can't "track my presence around the web", though - no js means no fingerprinting, no tracking cookie, nothing. Juuuust a blind IP address.
But the recommended way is to prefetch the avatars directly from your server and offer them on your own cdn.
As for the value it provides, well for one thing I pretty much never have to upload my avatar to websites anymore - it's an avatar attached to my email addresses instead and that's very nice. Of course I'd prefer a proper identity protocol but nobody's working on one. If you want to, be my guest...
I think we disagree on one basic topic, I dont want an easily distinguishable identity to track across the internet.
I would rather external actors (say gravatar does nothing wrong) not be able to identify which email address I use on a site they do not own, and not be able to track my user signups by something that might be public information, which generally a site does not advertise.
Unlike every actual tracker on the internet, Gravatar is opt-in. Things like google analytics, facebook like button/tweet button etc, they are all opt-out.
I would rather have less ad tracking pixels on someone elses websites if possible, but I am genuinely interested in the value that gravatar provides to people who like the service.