can’t we use a “identicon” of our own? i pretty sure there are some open solutions out there… I don’t quite like the letters idea as they will eventually fail with “too many people using the same initial letter”…
this are two examples: GitHub - chrisbranson/ruby_identicon: A Ruby gem for creating Github like identicons, GitHub - swdyh/quilt: A Ruby library for generating identicon
(I agree with the “lets get out of the surveillance network” but I really like the identicons implementation… maybe letters be one of the possible options).