Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling results

Re:Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling res... by mmastrac on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @01:32PM (#3048968)

Even worse, Gravatar images are generally linked via MD5 hash. If you see two Gravatars with the same hash on two different sites, you've found the same person. Combine that with a large spam list of email addresses, or brute force simple addresses from common suffixes like @gmail.com and @hotmail.com and you've got identities.

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Re:Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling res... by jodrellblank on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @05:03PM (#3049902)

Or combine with another service which uses MD5 hashes differently. You used to be able to copy a Gravatar hash into a Disqus url and see the email address, if that person had ever made any Disqus comments on any blog anywhere using their email address.

No brute-force necessary.

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Re:Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling res... by aidos on Thursday September 29, 2011 @04:52AM (#3051659)

And worse again, I just discovered that there's no way to delete a Gravatar account. Even if you unlink your email address from the account it still keeps it linked behind the scenes (you can sign in with your "deleted" address).

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