Gravatar

Gravatar is a public avatar and profile service tied to email addresses. UserSearch integrates it as a Module (data source) so that when you run an Email search, the address can be resolved against Gravatar’s public profile API.

What Gravatar is

Gravatar (“Globally Recognised Avatar”) lets a person attach an avatar and a small public profile to their email address. Rather than exposing the raw address, Gravatar keys profiles on a hash of the email. Given an address, the Gravatar Module computes that hash and asks Gravatar whether a public profile exists for it. This is a passive lookup against publicly published profile data — nothing is sent to the address owner.

What data it returns

When a match exists, the Gravatar Module can surface the public fields the account holder chose to publish, typically:

• Display name — the name shown on the public Gravatar profile
• Location — a free-text location, if the person set one
• Avatar — the profile image associated with the address

If no public profile is linked to the hashed address, the Module returns no match. Absence of a Gravatar profile is not evidence about the address itself, only that no public profile is published.

Draft — behaviour awaiting confirmation

The precise field set (whether “real name and location” are consistently returned versus optional and often blank), the freshness of the data, and how much of a profile Gravatar exposes without authentication are not yet confirmed for UserSearch v2.0.20. Treat the returned name and location as user-supplied, self-declared values rather than verified identity attributes.

Which search types and Modules use it

Search type	Module	Role
Email	Gravatar	Resolves the email’s hash to a public Gravatar profile (name, location, avatar).

The Gravatar Module runs under the Email search type. It may also contribute rows when the email is passed through OneScan, the Module that runs several data sources at once; in that view the Data Source column attributes each row to Gravatar.

How to access it in UserSearch

1. Choose the Email search type.
2. Enter the email address you want to look up.
3. Run the search and open the Gravatar Module, or read the merged results if you ran OneScan.
4. Attribute any name, location, or avatar row to Gravatar via the Data Source column before you rely on it.

Official site

• Gravatar: https://gravatar.com

Reliability note

Draft — reliability characterisation

Gravatar returns self-declared profile data: the account holder controls the name, location, and avatar, and any of these can be blank, pseudonymous, stale, or deliberately misleading. What is solid is that UserSearch integrates Gravatar as an Email-search data source and attributes its rows accordingly; the strength of any single field is a matter for corroboration, not assumption. Coverage, update frequency, and the exact fields exposed await confirmation.

Verified against UserSearch v2.0.20