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My automatically generated Gravatar has changed. Is that normal? I thought they were supposed to be permanent. I used to have a purple pattern IIRC, now it is light blue, a color I have never seen. It does not match the one on other SE sites either.

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    $\begingroup$ If you wished to restore your old gravatar, you could possibly download it from e.g. web.archive.org/web/20160926205000im_/https://www.gravatar.com/…, and then upload it to mathoverflow.net as your profile image. $\endgroup$
    – jeq
    May 25 at 22:40
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    $\begingroup$ @jeq But is that safe? From what I understand, it can leak my e-mail or some data like that. (And, actually, if the old gravatars are permanently backed up on the internet archive the damage may already be done.) $\endgroup$
    – Federico Poloni
    May 25 at 22:51
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    $\begingroup$ I believe it the file name of the gravatar which is derived from your e-mail address. So you could change it before uploading--but stackexchange is unlikely to preserve this. But it might be possible to derive info from the pixels! And the Wayback Machine has been mentioned in this comment: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389123/…. $\endgroup$
    – jeq
    May 26 at 1:15
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    $\begingroup$ "light blue, a color I have never seen" Quick, did you have a new experience when seeing it for the first time? (if yes, then we can prove that qualia exist :-) $\endgroup$
    – Carl-Fredrik Nyberg Brodda
    May 26 at 13:30

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This is because of a change that was made to the process that Stack Exchange used to generate the gravatars. The change was done for security reasons because of a vulnerability that was found in the old process.

Here is a quick summary from CM Cesar M:

We've recently discovered a vulnerability in our identicon generation process. To remedy it, we have changed how we approach generating them and regenerated all identicons. We do not have any indication that any personally identifiable information (PII) was leaked as part of this vulnerability.

Source and more information on this issue can be found here: We're regenerating all Gravatar identicons

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