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](https://www.gravatar.com/) to get a picture
corresponding to the email address.

[Gravatar](//www.gravatar.com/), 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.](https://automattic.com/contact/), 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.