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](https://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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