[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #14682: Privacy leakage: gravatars leak identity information

[WordPress Trac]

#14682: Privacy leakage: gravatars leak identity information
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 Reporter:  jmdh             |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  defect (bug)     |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Privacy          |     Version:  3.0
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  privacy-roadmap  |     Focuses:
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Comment (by pputzer):

 Replying to [comment:57 chrisherbert]:
 > If you're proxying Gravatars through the site itself, do you need to do
 any hashing at all?  Couldn't you just do something like example.com/wp-
 admin/gravatar-proxy.php?comment_id=1234, which would fetch the Gravatar
 server side and pass it on the user?
 >
 > That way you wouldn't be exposing anything more than the comment ID,
 which doesn't seem sensitive at all.  I guess you'd be serving some
 redundant images, since each comment would have a unique image URL even if
 they're from the same user.  That doesn't seem like a big deal though.

 Two main issues:
 - Not all avatar uses are for comments (e.g. embedded author boxes, the
 WordPress admin bar).
 - Scalability - you don't want PHP proxying every single one of those
 images on every page load.

 So we need to construct a valid URL that can be handled directly by the
 web server if the cached file already exists, but that allows PHP to have
 all the necessary information to request the image upstream if it is not
 there.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14682#comment:58>
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