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I vaguely remember hearing that Gravatar had some security or privacy flaw. I think it was that someone could extract your e-mail address if you used a Gravatar. Is Gravatar safe? How do you know?

Update: There's a similar question about it on Meta Stack Overflow, but I don't understand the discussion well enough to know if I should worry about using Gravatar.

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Speaking personally I've used Gravatar since signing up with Stack Overflow nearly 2 years ago and haven't noticed any problems.

I used a unique e-mail address which is only used for Stack Exchange sites which means that if it was compromised they wouldn't get very far, and if e-mails started turning up from strange sources using that address I'd know it had been hacked.

So far I haven't had any such e-mails.

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Hmm...good idea. Not sure setting up a unique e-mail address would work for me, though. – Firefeather Dec 3 '10 at 19:45
Not really hacked, per se, but more extracted. – digitxp Dec 3 '10 at 20:03
@digitxp - which is why I use a different e-mail for Gravatar to everything else. That way if it is compromised they can't get access to other accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) because that's not the e-mail I used to sign up to those. – ChrisF♦ Dec 3 '10 at 20:15
would it be good enough to use a Gmail plus alias (adding + and whatever word you want, just before the @ sign), then? – Firefeather Dec 15 '10 at 17:36
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@Firefeather - probably. I don't use Gmail myself, but to the site where you're signing up it will be a different e-mail address - though if it does get harvested it would be easy to get your base address. – ChrisF♦ Dec 15 '10 at 17:53
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