Partner Disable Gravatar

A new feature has been introduced in Odoo v10 in the base module: when you enter an email address in the form view of a partner, Odoo will send a query to gravatar.com to get a picture corresponding to the email address.

Gravatar, which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar, is a website where any user can open an account and register a correspondance between his email address and a picture. That way, his picture/avatar will be automatically set on all websites that are connected to gravatar.com: he won’t have to manually configure his picture/avatar on every website.

In Odoo, when you enter an email address in the form view of a partner (i.e. triggered via the onchange on the email field) and this partner doesn’t have any image yet in Odoo, Odoo will automatically send an HTTPS query to www.gravatar.com with an MD5 hash of the email of the partner. If it receives an answer from gravatar.com in the form of a picture within the 5 seconds timeout, it will set this picture on the image field of the partner in Odoo.

Some people may consider it as a cool feature to easily get picture on partners with no effort.

But other people may consider this as an annoying feature that adds unnecessary network trafic or, worse, as a leak of information. With this feature, gravatar.com is notified of all the email addresses added in the Odoo database, so it may be considered as a leak of information to a third party company (gravatar.com is operated by Automattic Inc., an American company). The problem is that there is no way to disable this feature via a configuration parameter of Odoo. This module brings a solution to this problem: once installed, it disables the feature.

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