👓 Millions of Instagram influencers had their private contact data scraped and exposed | TechCrunch

Read Millions of Instagram influencers had their private contact data scraped and exposed (TechCrunch)
A massive database containing contact information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. The database, hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside. At the time of writing, the database had…

👓 Facebook 'sorry' for exposing millions of users' photos | CNN

Read Facebook 'sorry' for exposing millions of users' photos (CNN)
Facebook announced on Friday that the social network had exposed the private photos of millions of users without their permission.

👓 Gravatar Advisory: How to Protect Your Email Address and Identity | Wordfence

Read Gravatar Advisory: How to Protect Your Email Address and Identity (Wordfence)
Update: We’ve added comments at the end of the post pointing out that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) considers an email address to be personally identifiable information or PII. Gravatar is a service that provides users with a profile image that can appear on many sites across the Net. It is integrated with …

👓 This Bot Tweets Photos and Names of People Who Bought 'Drugs' on Venmo | Motherboard | Vice

Read This Bot Tweets Photos and Names of People Who Bought 'Drugs' on Venmo (Motherboard)
Venmo transaction data is public by default. But a programmer has taken that data stream and is tweeting the username and photos of users who buy 'drugs'.

👓 Reasons for Using Avatar Privacy | Code by Der Mundschenk & Cie.

Read Reasons for Using Avatar Privacy (Code by Der Mundschenk & Cie.)
In what way are avatars a pri­va­cy risk? To dis­play an avatar im­age, you pub­lish an en­crypt­ed ver­sion (MD5) of the e-​mail ad­dress in the gravatar’s im­age URL. Gra​vatar​.com then de­cides if there is an avatar im­age to de­liv­er, oth­er­wise the de­fault im­age is de­liv­ered. The de­fault image’s ad­dress is al­so part of the over­all gra­vatar …

👓 Avatar Privacy | WordPress.org

Read Avatar Privacy by Peter Putzer, Johannes Freudendahl (WordPress.org)

Avatars from Gravatar.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 5.6 and WordPress 4.9. For the plugin to do anything for you, you need to visit the discussion settings page in the WordPress admin area and save the new settings. Please note that the plugin does not provide an options page of its own, it rather adds to the existing discussion settings page.