In reply to pepe.

Yes it is a proprietary solution and that makes me uncomfortable too.

But local caching is NOT the same as local avatars. Local avatars require a user to upload on everyone site (which won’t happen). With local caching you are just copying gravatar (or Facebook or whoever) locally. So you actually get frictionless avatar without compromising privacy.

The ideal solution is a non proprietary gravatar, with a better privacy algorithm. That would require Matt Mullenweg to donatw gravatar to wordpress.org though