Telegram publishes users' locations online

Perhaps TG should publish an API to allow people to see any users government ID if they are scammed.

This is a imperfect solution. There's two possibilities: the offset (aka "random number") is dynamic, or it's fixed. If it's the former all you have to do is sample enough times to get through the noise. If it's the latter, it's not vulnerable to the previous attack, but if you have a known point of reference (so you can deduce what the offset is), then you can still stalk them (forever?). IMO the only way to do is "properly" is to quantize people into map cells, like how apple does it with their coarse location feature[1].

[1] "Apple doesn't reduce the accuracy of location fixes by adding noise. Instead, they've carved up the world into regions, allowing approximate locations to preserve the user's current city when possible." https://radar.io/blog/understanding-approximate-location-in-...

In my own products I fix this by aggressively rounding/adding noise before the distance calculation is performed, and then rounding again afterwards, or quantizing into ranges (e.g. '0-10 miles'). Other solutions can be storing locations imprecisely to begin with, using pre-defined geobuckets, and so on, although remember that randomness by itself can be bypassed with enough queries since it will average out. It's rare that you need to know exactly how far away someone is from you rather than a rough approximation. Telegram is definitely not the only product with this issue, but hopefully they fix it even so.