In reply to David McCan.

Adding something to the privacy policy doesn't remove privacy concerns. It just makes what they are doing with the data clearer. Whatever the privacy policy says you'll still be giving data to a third party, and some people don't want to do that.

Plus - what's wrong with having more choices? You don't have to use this. And if Gravatar does get removed from core (which I can't see happening), I'm sure there will be a plugin to add it back pretty quickly.