WTF?? This does not make any sense. Why the fuck would a GNU project choose Gravatar? Are they insane??? I hope they revert this decision. Did you talk to them about this?
It must be really hard to selfhost 16×16 images, I suppose …
But to be fair: The worst thing that can happen is that these avatar images won't render in some point in future. Also, the user of this website is "safe", you are not forced to run any JavaScript code for this. But there's a catch: There's still a 3rd-party request to
http://www.gravatar.com to request a 16×16 image, which is at least a privacy issue. I always dislike it if a website requests resources from elsewhere. Just self-host your own freaking resources, why is this so hard?
But this is a GNU project, so this *really* shouldn't have happened. If not even the GNU project sticks to its guns anymore, it's game over.
There's also <https://www.libravatar.org/>, but I think the whole idea behind this avatar hosting is dumb, it's a solution in search of a problem. I would be more than happy if Gravatar, Libravatar and all clones die in a fire.
I would really love to know what led them to this.