What I remember from my conversations with @Pginer-WMF (was from last year, iirc):

• avatars are an alternative to costumed signatures on Flow (see T90055)
• avatars can be offending or copyright violations. It is not always easy to solve those cases and the idea os not to add more work on admins' plates.
• a possible way to have avatars that are not problematic would be to provide a set of safe icons to put on a set of colored backgrounds.

In T167509#3335402, @Trizek-WMF wrote:

What I remember from my conversations with @Pginer-WMF (was from last year, iirc):

• avatars are an alternative to costumed signatures on Flow (see T90055)
• avatars can be offending or copyright violations. It is not always easy to solve those cases and the idea os not to add more work on admins' plates.
• a possible way to have avatars that are not problematic would be to provide a set of safe icons to put on a set of colored backgrounds.

I illustrated that idea in T128953#3068624 (don't pay too much attention to the specific execution, but the concept).
I don't know if allowing images from Commons would be actually problematic, but I wanted to make the point that if that were the case, there are alternatives that can be explored.

If you really want a technical solution to possible copyright misuse, allowing files from commons is probably exactly what you should do. Unlike local projects, they don't have fair use images at all, and you can further narrow down options by only showing in search results files belonging to categories of licenses that are viable.

An approach might be to have as configuration where to allow files from (local/remote) and what categories to specifically allow or disallow. This would allow reasonable configuration for use cases across a lot of different sites, I expect.

In T167509#3337551, @Isarra wrote:

If you really want a technical solution to possible copyright misuse, allowing files from commons is probably exactly what you should do. Unlike local projects, they don't have fair use images at all, and you can further narrow down options by only showing in search results files belonging to categories of licenses that are viable.

An approach might be to have as configuration where to allow files from (local/remote) and what categories to specifically allow or disallow. This would allow reasonable configuration for use cases across a lot of different sites, I expect.

Copyright misuse is one one the issues, and I agree that the current processes could help with that (although we need to take into account possible volume increase). However, we also need to meet the user expectations of simplicity for a process such as uploading your avatar image, which normally does not involve describing, categorising it, or sending an OTRS request to prove you got permission from the person that took you that picture.