Avatar Pri­va­cy

Avatars from Gra​vatar​.com are great, but they come with cer­tain pri­va­cy im­pli­ca­tions. You as site ad­min may al­ready know this, but your vis­i­tors and users prob­a­bly don’t. Avatar Pri­va­cy can help to im­prove the pri­va­cy sit­u­a­tion by mak­ing some sub­tle changes to the way avatars are dis­played on your site.

The plu­g­in works with­out chang­ing your theme files if you use a mod­ern theme, and it does sup­port (sim­ple) mul­ti­site in­stal­la­tions. It re­quires at least PHP 7.0 and Word­Press 5.2. For the plu­g­in to do any­thing for you, you need to vis­it the dis­cus­sion set­tings page in the Word­Press ad­min area and en­able Show Avatars. Please note that the plu­g­in does not pro­vide an op­tions page of its own, it rather adds to the ex­ist­ing Discussion set­tings page.

Fea­tures

The plug­in’s fea­tures summed up:

  • Add lo­cal avatar caching to en­sure the pri­va­cy of your web­site visitors.
  • Let users and com­menters ex­plic­it­ly opt-​in be­fore us­ing gravatars.
  • Don’t pub­lish en­crypt­ed e‑mail ad­dress­es for peo­ple who are not mem­bers of Gra​vatar​.com.
  • Use de­fault avatar im­ages host­ed on your serv­er rather than Gra​vatar​.com.

If you are in­ter­est­ed in the top­ic, there’s al­so a more de­tailed dis­cus­sion on the Rea­sons for Us­ing Avatar Pri­va­cy.

In­stal­la­tion

Avatar Pri­va­cy can be in­stalled from the Word­Press plu­g­in repos­i­to­ry. If you’d like to di­rect­ly fol­low our on­go­ing de­vel­op­ment ef­forts, you can do so on GitHub (fea­ture re­quests and bug re­ports are al­so wel­come there).

Cred­its

Avatar Pri­va­cy is based on the orig­i­nal plu­g­in by Jo­hannes Freuden­dahl. The new re­lease al­so in­cludes work by sev­er­al oth­er people:

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57 Comments

  • john wrote:

    I just up­dat­ed to the lat­est ver­sion and now I can’t see my site.

    ??????

    Respond to this

    • @John: I am sor­ry to hear that. I’ll need some more in­for­ma­tion about your site (PHP and WP ver­sions main­ly and any­thing that might be un­usu­al about it). Can you look if there’s any­thing in your PHP er­ror log? (If you’d like, we can take this to email. Just leave me a short note here and I’ll con­tact your.)

  • john wrote:

    Since the plu­g­in up­date all my word­press set­tings etc and the web­site just dis­play as white pages with no vis­i­ble con­tent. php 5.6

    Respond to this

    • OK, so it’s not the PHP ver­sion. Can you please look at the PHP er­ror log? There should be an er­ror mes­sage there that will tell me more on why the site crashes.

  • john wrote:

    I can­nott ac­cess any­thing in word­press — set­tings, logs etc. all are just white pages.

    Respond to this

    • I don’t know about your spe­cif­ic host­ing plan, but nor­mal­ly, there is a way to low-​level con­fig­u­ra­tion files and er­ror mes­sages. One such file is the PHP er­ror log. (The path should be list­ed in your php.ini in the error_log directive.)

      To de­ac­ti­vate a plu­g­in when the Word­Press back­end crash­es. you need shell or filesys­tem ac­cess to your (vir­tu­al) serv­er and re­name the plu­g­in fold­er. In this case, [path to wordpress]/wp-content/plugins/avatar-privacy/ needs to be delet­ed or renamed.

  • john wrote:

    Thanks! Re­named the plu­g­in fold­er and now every­thing is back to nor­mal. BUT, with no avatar pri­va­cy. hmmmm

    Respond to this

  • Tim Themann wrote:

    Hi, un­for­tu­nate­ly, the plu­g­in throws a SQL er­ror on activation:

    WordPress-​Datenbank-​Fehler You have an er­ror in your SQL syn­tax; check the man­u­al that cor­re­sponds to your MySQL serv­er ver­sion for the right syn­tax to use near ‘WHERE meta_​key like ‘_​site_​transient_​avatar_​privacy_​%’ and site_​id = 1’ at line 1 fxc3xbcr Abfrage SELECT meta_​key FROM WHERE meta_​key like ‘_​site_​transient_​avatar_​privacy_​%’ and site_​id = 1 von do_action(‘wp_ajax_delete-plugin’), WP_Hook->do_action, WP_Hook->apply_filters, wp_​ajax_​delete_​plugin, delete_​plugins, uninstall_​plugin, do_action(‘uninstall_avatar-privacy/avatar-privacy.php’), WP_Hook->do_action, WP_Hook->apply_filters, Avatar_Privacy\Components\Uninstallation::uninstall, Avatar_Privacy\Components\Uninstallation::delete_transients, Mundschenk\Data_Storage\Site_Transients->get_keys_from_database

    Respond to this

    • Is that a fa­tal er­ror on your site? I no­ticed it in the plug​in​tests​.com re­port. The site_meta ta­ble does not ex­ist on sin­gle­site in­stalls. The plu­g­in should still work, though (the called func­tion is on­ly for site tran­sients clean-up).

      A fixed ver­sion will be re­leased lat­er tonight.

    • Tim Themann wrote:

      Cor­rect, I´m sor­ry. That one was from unin­stal­la­tion. On ac­ti­va­tion, it throws

      CUT
      WordPress-​Datenbank-​Fehler You have an er­ror in your SQL syn­tax; check the man­u­al that cor­re­sponds to your MySQL serv­er ver­sion for the right syn­tax to use near ‘WHERE meta_​key like ‘_​site_​transient_​avatar_​privacy_​%’ and site_​id = 1’ at line 1 fxc3xbcr Abfrage SELECT meta_​key FROM WHERE meta_​key like ‘_​site_​transient_​avatar_​privacy_​%’ and site_​id = 1 von activate_​plugin, include_once(‘/plugins/avatar-privacy/avatar-privacy.php’), run_​avatar_​privacy, Dice\Dice->create, Dice\Dice->Dice\{closure}, Dice\Dice->Dice\{closure}, Dice\Dice->create, Dice\Dice->Dice\{closure}, Dice\Dice->Dice\{closure}, Dice\Dice->create, Dice\Dice->Dice\{closure}, ReflectionMethod->invokeArgs, Avatar_Privacy\Data_Storage\Site_Transients->__construct, Mundschenk\Data_Storage\Transients->__construct, Mundschenk\Data_Storage\Abstract_Cache->__construct, Mundschenk\Data_Storage\Transients->invalidate, Mundschenk\Data_Storage\Site_Transients->get_keys_from_database
       — CUT —

    • That’s fixed in 1.0.1. The er­ror should not have had any ill ef­fect, though, ex­cept for not clean­ing up site tran­sients prop­er­ly on uninstall.

    • Tim Themann wrote:

      On­ly once and not re­pro­ducible (un­for­tu­nate­ly I can not pin­point that one) it threw

      CUT
      WordPress-​Datenbank-​Fehler Du­pli­cate col­umn name ‘time’ fxc3xbcr Abfrage ALTER TABLE ‘wp_​gravatars‘ ADD ‘time‘ int von activate_​plugin, do_action(‘activate_fv-gravatar-cache/fv-gravatar-cache.php’), WP_Hook->do_action, WP_Hook->apply_filters, fv_gravatar_cache_activation
       — CUT —

      It is non-​fatal and func­tion­al­i­ty does not seem to be af­fect­ed. If this is “nor­mal” for non-​multisite in­stal­la­tions, I´d sim­ply count it as a cos­met­ic issue ;-).

      By the way: This is is pret­ty much what a lot of peo­ple might be look­ing for at the mo­ment! Thanks a lot!

  • Tim Themann wrote:

    Oh. Cor­rect. I re­placed the FV Gra­vatar Cache plu­g­in, there­fore the er­ror that plu­g­in threw dur­ing de­ac­ti­va­tion went right be­tween the oth­er ones in the log. Sor­ry for the confusion.

    Respond to this

  • Frank Kunert wrote:

    Thank you very much for this very use­ful plu­g­in. If I dis­able or delete the plu­g­in and pre­vi­ous­ly se­lect­ed Sil­hou­ette as the de­fault avatar, no de­fault avatar will be dis­played and cre­at­ing an http sta­tus 400 when ac­cess­ing i0​.wp​.com. Sug­ges­tion: Change Sil­hou­ette to “Mys­te­ri­ous Per­son” at deactivation.

    Respond to this

  • vilmoskörte wrote:

    It does not work for me: The gra­vatar im­age is saved in wp-​content/​uploads/​avatar-​privacy/​cache, and if a add a new com­ment the check­box at the text “Ein Gravatar-​Bild neben meinen Kom­mentaren anzeigen.” is checked, how­ev­er, there is no gra­vatar im­age dis­played along with the com­ment. Al­so, the ta­ble wp_​avatar_​privacy in the SQL data­base has no rows. 

    Lat­est Word­Press, PHP 7.1.18

    Respond to this

    • Are you per­haps us­ing a mail ad­dress for an anony­mous com­ment that is used by a reg­is­tered user on your site? In that case, the val­ue is not saved to pre­vent avatar dis­clo­sure by fraud­u­lent comments.

  • vilmoskörte wrote:

    Ich habe noch ein weit­eres Prob­lem: Aus guten Grün­den musste ich in Word­Press die Vari­ablen Home-​URL und Website-​URL auf den Pun­y­code https://​xn​-​-vil​moskrte​-kcb​.de statt http://vilmoskörte.de setzen:

    Home-​URL https://​xn​-​-vil​moskrte​-kcb​.de
    Website-​URL https://​xn​-​-vil​moskrte​-kcb​.de

    Seit­dem bleibt die Check­box “Ein Gravatar-​Bild neben meinen Kom­mentaren anzeigen.” im­mer aus­geschal­tet, auch wenn ich sie beim let­zten Kom­men­tieren eingeschal­tet hat­te. Gle­ich­wohl ist das Cook­ie comment_​use_​gravatar_​a1b16743124519a8fc9b7ade2eac1c0a für die Web­site xn​-​-vil​moskrte​-kcb​.de auf 1 geset­zt. (Und wird auf 0 geset­zt, wenn ich einen Kom­men­tar ohne Häkchen an der Check­box sende).

    Respond to this

  • vilmoskörte wrote:

    Eine An­re­gung: Ich fände es gut, wenn mit dem Text zur Check­box unter dem Kom­men­tar (“Ein Gravatar-​Bild neben meinen Kom­mentaren anzeigen.”) eine Er­läuterung aus­gegeben würde, aus der her­vorge­ht, dass die Ein­bindung der Pro­fil­bilder ohne Über­mit­tlung per­so­n­en­be­zo­gen­er Dat­en er­fol­gt, ggf. mit einem op­tionalen, in den Ein­stel­lun­gen zu set­zen­den Link auf einen er­läutern­den Text. 

    Grund: Ich habe das zwar in mein­er Cookie-​Policy er­läutert, aber wer li­est die schon. Und in­zwis­chen haben die Leute mit­gekom­men, das Gra­vatar “böse” sein kön­nte und set­zen aus Furcht keinen Haken.

    Respond to this

  • Andy wrote:

    Thanks for this Avatar man­ag­er. Works per­fect­ly when I am logged in as ad­min, but when log­ging in as nor­mal user edit­ing my pro­file I do not get the op­tion to Choose File. I on­ly get Gra­vatar op­tion which is too com­pli­cat­ed. How to fix this?

    Respond to this

    • Andy: What role is as­signed to your “nor­mal” user? File up­load­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties are need­ed for up­load­ing your own avatar (at the mo­ment there is no way to choose an im­age from Me­dia Library).

  • Andy wrote:

    That was prompt — thanks! Un­der settings-​general I have ticked any­body kan reg­is­ter and choosen sub­scriber as stan­dard sta­tus. Should that be Au­thor instead?
    As Ad­min I can choose from my Media/​Pictures li­brary. Can or­di­nary users nev­er do so?
    /​A

    Respond to this

    • Avatar Pri­va­cy on­ly has the up­load pos­si­bil­i­ty for lo­cal avatars, no “choose from li­brary” fea­ture for any­one. Are you maybe al­so us­ing an­oth­er plu­g­in for user avatars? Avatar Pri­va­cy has some in­te­gra­tions that dis­able its na­tive up­load­ing fea­ture in def­er­ence to, for ex­am­ple, WP User Man­ager’s. If so, you would need to check whether there are set­tings in that plu­g­in that can change its behavior.

  • Sebas wrote:

    I up­loaded pic­ture A. Great, now pic­ture A was my avatar.

    I checked “delete lo­cal avatar pic­ture” and pressed save. Great, no avatar any­more. (And great, be­cause it was a test pic­ture of a dog, not the one I wanted).

    I browsed, se­lect­ed a bet­ter pic­ture for pos­ter­i­ty, pressed Save changes… pic­ture of the dog again.

    I delete, up­load what­ev­er I want, and I al­ways have pic­ture A when­ev­er there’s a pic­ture up­loaded, even if I clicked “delete lo­cal avatar”.

    I mean, it’s prob­a­ble a cache, but it’s a big bug that makes the plu­g­in tem­porar­i­ly use­less to me.

    Respond to this

    • @sebas: That would be your brows­er caching the im­age (just re­fresh the cache by us­ing shift-reload). I’ve no­ticed the is­sue my­self on my MAMP test sites, but not on the live ver­sion. Might be a dif­fer­ence be­tween Ng­inx and Apache? I’ll look in­to it, but it will not be a prob­lem any­one else ac­cess­ing the same image.

  • open source news wrote:

    Da auch wir für un­sere neue WP-​Installation die DSGVO um­set­zen, waren wir SEHR froh, so eine ein­fache Lö­sung zu haben 😀

    DAAAAANKE 🙂

    Respond to this

  • Hel­lo Avatar Privacy,

    I have im­ple­ment­ed Avatar Pri­va­cy on our WooCom­merce site. If you’d like to reg­is­ter you can see how I’ve in­te­grat­ed [avatar-​privacy-​form] in the My­Ac­count dash­board. How­ev­er, this was by stum­bling around. (We don’t do prod­uct down­loads, so I’ve used that endpoint).

    How­ev­er, have I missed some­thing? Be­cause I could not find any doc­u­men­ta­tion on hooks, short­codes, com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with WooCom­merce, us­age, … for the plu­g­in. Main­ly I found my clues in the re­lease notes.

    Re­gards,
    Barry

    Respond to this

    • @Barry: I have no di­rect ex­pe­ri­ence with WooCom­merce in­te­gra­tion, so no, you haven’t missed any ad­di­tion­al doc­u­men­ta­tion. De­vel­op­er doc­u­men­ta­tion is some­thing I even­tu­al­ly want to write up, but un­for­tu­nate­ly, there is nev­er enough time (but re­lease notes and in­line doc­u­men­ta­tion will al­ways be up to date — that I do ensure).

      Though if you like to write a blog post about the chal­lenges you en­coun­tered (or even a HOWTO), I’ll link to it or pub­lish it here as a guest post.

      PS: From a pri­va­cy per­spec­tive, you re­al­ly should have a non-​infinite da­ta re­ten­tion pe­ri­od (or rather: some da­ta should have a non-​infinite re­ten­tion pe­ri­od, though I know it is a pain to en­force with WordPress).

  • Hel­lo Peter,

    In my code I had suc­cess­ful­ly been us­ing get_​avatar() to pro­vide the gra­vatar for an au­thor if one is avail­able. Now with Avatar Pri­va­cy ac­ti­vat­ed, get_​avatar() re­turns the mys­tery per­son, re­gard­less of whether the au­thor has ‘Dis­play a gra­vatar …” ticked or not. If I de­ac­ti­vate Avatar Pri­va­cy, I get the gra­vatar when expected. 

    I sus­pect I need to be do­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent from call­ing get_​avatar() in code now that Avatar Pri­va­cy is ac­ti­vat­ed? Please can you ad­vise what I should be doing?

    Many thanks,
    Barry

    Respond to this

    • @Barry: I as­sume you are us­ing the email ad­dress as the “ob­ject” in the get_avatar() call? If so, the plu­g­in does not know you are try­ing to ac­cess a user and will treat is an anony­mous com­ment au­thor email. If there’s a user reg­is­tered for the same email ad­dress, Avatar Pri­va­cy will not dis­play the Gra­vatar un­less the user al­so has “Logged-​out Com­ment­ing” enabled.

      It will work as ex­pect­ed if you first get the user ob­ject via get_user_by( 'email', $email ).

    • Hi Pe­ter,

      All good now. I had­n’t re­alised the wider im­pli­ca­tion of “Logged-​ot Com­ment­ing”, since on our site you can’t com­ment un­less you’re logged in. So I’d men­tal­ly ig­nored that checkbox.

      So now I must up­date our au­thor in­struc­tions to en­sure they al­ways check “Logged-​our Com­ment­ing” if they want their pro­file pic­ture with their au­thor bio.

      Many thanks,
      Barry

    • @Barry: While en­abling the set­ting is a workaround, I can­not rec­om­mend it. Chang­ing your code from get_avatar( $email ) to get_avatar( get_user_by( 'email', $email ) ) will work with or with­out Avatar Pri­va­cy. There’s no need for them to use the “logged-​out com­ment­ing” feature.

    • Hi Pe­ter,

      Well I’ve tried you’re sug­ges­tion with the re­sults side by side to en­sure there are no caching is­sues. The test code;


      $author_email = get_the_author_meta('user_email', $post->post_author) ;
      $user = get_user_by( 'email', $author_email);
      $avatar_peter = get_avatar( $user, 90 );

      $avatar = get_avatar( get_the_author_meta('user_email', $post->post_author) , 90 );


      // Test avatars side by side
      $author_details .= '' . $avatar . $avatar_peter . nl2br( $user_description ). '';

      The re­sult is be­yond my com­pre­hen­sion. With the au­thor hav­ing “logged-​out com­ments” checked, I see $avatar as the ex­pect­ed gra­vatar, but $avatar_peter gives the set de­fault mys­tery man! Uncheck­ing “logged-​out com­ments” re­sults in both avatars be­ing the mys­tery man. 

      Re­gards,
      barry

    • Fur­ther to the above (I was bounced for not be­ing concise):

      Nat­u­ral­ly I’ve not done this test in live, but you can see an ex­am­ple of the bio that’s con­struct­ed if you scroll down the page.

      I have checked the code in ph­p­Storm and the cor­rect user email is be­ing re­turned, and re­sults in the cor­rect user ob­ject, so no er­ror that I can see.

      Al­though you de­scribe us­ing the “logged-​out com­ments” check­box as a workaround, it sort of makes sense to me, be­cause the au­thor is not logged in, in­deed no one may be logged in when the bio is viewed. It’s not oner­ous and au­thors prob­a­bly want all the ex­po­sure they can get. 

      Apolo­gies for the length, but there you go,
      Barry

    • Ah, I thought you need­ed this for com­ment au­thors. For post au­thors, just hand­ing the $post ob­ject to get_avatar() should be enough. I’m not sure what’s go­ing wrong with the ex­am­ple code (you can add some calls to error_log() to see which of the func­tions is fail­ing), but the whole back-​and-​forth con­ver­sion is not nec­es­sary to dis­play the avatar for a post author.

  • Cheng Shen wrote:

    Avatar Pri­va­cy re­veals the email ad­dress of any com­menter to any­one who cares.

    While Word­Press de­fault gen­er­at­ed avatars are com­plete­ly un­salt­ed, and thus eas­i­ly re­versed, re­veal­ing the true email ad­dress of every com­menter to any­one who cares, and to the cen­tral avatar im­age serv­er se​cure​.gra​vatar​.com (why is there a cen­tral im­age serv­er for lo­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed image)

    Avatar Pri­va­cy im­age names can be re­versed to email ad­dress­es with on­ly slight­ly more dif­fi­cul­ty, be­cause it us­es a thir­ty two bit site wide salt in­stead of a two fifty six bit salt.

    Giv­en a known email ad­dress, one can find the salt. Hav­ing found the salt, one can then re­verse the hash, which is re­vealed by the name of the im­age file.

    Respond to this

    • @Cheng Shen: You are cor­rect that a per-​address hash would be cryp­to­graph­i­cal­ly bet­ter. It is some­thing I might im­ple­ment in a fu­ture ver­sion of Avatar Pri­va­cy. If you’d like to do a pull re­quest on GitHub, I’ll glad­ly in­clude it in the next version. 

      Where we dis­agree is that un­salt­ed MD5 and (site-​wide) salt­ed SHA-​256 are at all in the same cat­e­go­ry. By de­fault, the Gra­vatar hash­es are not on­ly eas­i­ly re­versible, but can be tracked glob­al­ly across the en­tire web by every­one. This is pre­vent­ed by Avatar Pri­va­cy. Al­so, SHA-​256 is much more dif­fi­cult to brute-force.

      Re­gard­ing your com­ment about se​cure​.gra​vatar​.com, I don’t know what you are talk­ing about — gra​vatar​.com is on­ly con­tact­ed for com­menters who ex­plicite­ly state that they want to use their Gra­vatar (and on­ly on the back­end). Do­ing so ob­vi­ous­ly shares the MD5 hash of their mail ad­dress with gra​vatar​.com, but that is not pre­ventable when one wants to use that service.

      Any­way, even if you can’t or won’t use GitHub, I’m open to ac­tion­able sug­ges­tions for im­prove­ments here in the com­ments, so please let me know if you have got any spe­cif­ic pro­pos­als in mind.

  • Hel­lo, great plu­g­in, but with the “Gwolle Guest­book” un­for­tu­nate­ly on­ly the set in­di­vid­ual avatar is dis­played with the au­thors. I have al­so al­ready con­tact­ed the man­u­fac­tur­er of the “Gwolle Guest­book”, he says his plu­g­in us­es the stan­dard func­tion get_avatar().

    Respond to this

  • Hi guys,

    I have in­stalled Avatar Pri­va­cy to my Word​Press​.com host­ed web­site: dig​i​talesleben​.blog. Avatar is set on gra­vatar. In Einstellungen/​Diskussion the set­ting for Avatar anzeigen is active. 

    But I can­not see the ad­di­tion­al set­ting “Dis­play a Gra­vatar im­age next to my com­ments” be­low my com­ment sec­tion on blog posts. 

    I use the fol­low­ing ver­sions: WP 6.0.1, PHP 7.4.30, Jet­pack 11.3‑a.3

    Could you please check why this does not work properly?

    Respond to this

  • Hi Küchen­meis­ter,

    I de­ac­ti­vat­ed the com­ment mod­ule of Jet­pack. And now every­thing works fine with Avatar Pri­va­cy. Thank you for the great plu­g­in. I ap­pre­ci­ate the ad­di­tion­al pri­va­cy and to make my site more DSGVO/​GDPR compliant 😀 

    Best re­gards, Andreas

    Respond to this

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