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Telegram publishes users' locations online

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Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#111

Post by sudhirj »

est31 wrote: post #104
sudosysgen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe overlapping regions would be a fix?

I believe so yes. An inertia system or overlapping system are two ways to describe the same thing :).

Huh? Not the way I understood it. Inertia implies the world is divided into cells numbered 1 to N, and people don’t move from X to X + 1 unless they report, say 5, consecutive times from X + 1. Overlapping systems remap the cells 1,2,3 to 1; 2,3,4 to 2 and so on. So if someone oscillated between new no. 1 and new no. 2, you’d still have no of knowing whether they were in old style cells no 2 or 3.

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#112

Post by [deleted] »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #9
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #3

Telegram has so many anti features and dark patterns that I really wish it was less popular. I honestly use WhatsApp over Telegram because at least I know WhatsApp is insecure while people sometimes act like Telegram is a secure platform.

I’ve heard other folks say WhatsApp is insecure. Do you (or anyone else) have specific examples or concerns?

[deleted]

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#113

Post by e_proxus »

sudhirj wrote: post #111
est31 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so yes. An inertia system or overlapping system are two ways to describe the same thing :).

Huh? Not the way I understood it. Inertia implies the world is divided into cells numbered 1 to N, and people don’t move from X to X + 1 unless they report, say 5, consecutive times from X + 1. Overlapping systems remap the cells 1,2,3 to 1; 2,3,4 to 2 and so on. So if someone oscillated between new no. 1 and new no. 2, you’d still have no of knowing whether they were in old style cells no 2 or 3.

Inertia would just reduce the frequency of the jumps, not eliminate them completely. E.g. if you randomly get the new cell 6 times in a row you'll still oscillate, just slower.

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#114

Post by ve55 »

dheera wrote: post #88
ve55 wrote: post #8

The ability to find user locations via triangulation is overlooked in a lot of products - it's easy to not think twice when showing a user the distance between themselves and someone else. 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 loc…

Quantizing is much safer. Adding random noise is useless because one can just average multiple samples. If you want to be extra safe, quantize the user's lat/lon before computing the distance, and then quantize the distance again. (Quantizing only the distance can theoretically allow an attacker to travel in one direction until they see the transition from one bucket to the other which would tell them exactly when th…

Yeah, it's important to put a lot of thought into it if users can query often like this. Removing more information generally won't hurt most use cases a ton, so it's better to err on the side of caution with good quantization as you note suggest here.

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#115

Post by anigbrowl »

arthurcolle wrote: post #7

It's a shame that people still use Telegram when Signal is so much better, and has better credentials all around.

Signal has better encryption; I would not trust anything really confidential to Telegram. but Telegram has a vastly superior user interface and experience. It's one of the few pieces of software I can unreservedly say I love using.

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#116

Post by jessaustin »

andreareina wrote: post #63
algesten wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With enough data points you'd easily figure out that offset. Just overlay each data point with map data and decide whether the location makes sense. (i.e. you're unlikely to most of the time be in the middle of a lake, farm field etc)

Offset as function of user and location?

Where is this function stored?

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#117

Post by est31 »

sudhirj wrote: post #111
est31 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so yes. An inertia system or overlapping system are two ways to describe the same thing :).

Huh? Not the way I understood it. Inertia implies the world is divided into cells numbered 1 to N, and people don’t move from X to X + 1 unless they report, say 5, consecutive times from X + 1. Overlapping systems remap the cells 1,2,3 to 1; 2,3,4 to 2 and so on. So if someone oscillated between new no. 1 and new no. 2, you’d still have no of knowing whether they were in old style cells no 2 or 3.

> Not the way I understood it. Inertia implies the world is divided into cells numbered 1 to N, and people don’t move from X to X + 1 unless they report, say 5, consecutive times from X + 1. Overlapping systems remap the cells 1,2,3 to 1; 2,3,4 to 2 and so on. So if someone oscillated between new no. 1 and new no. 2, you’d still have no of knowing whether they were in old style cells no 2 or 3.

Hmm yeah I meant overlapping cells then, not inertia based ones.

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#118

Post by kelnos »

cwhiz wrote: post #41
arthurcolle wrote: post #7

It's a shame that people still use Telegram when Signal is so much better, and has better credentials all around.

Signal is terrible. I use the app still, but it’s horribly buggy. The disappearing messages, a hallmark feature, is fundamentally broken in some way that I can’t fully comprehend. Totally unreliable. Telegram is better in every way... except security.

I keep hearing people day that Signal is horribly buggy, but I've never even experienced one bug in the (Android) app. I've used it moderately for 3-4 years now.

(I haven't used the disappearing messages feature, though, so I can't speak to any possible bugs there.)

Re: Telegram publishes users' locations online

#119

Post by kelnos »

jjcon wrote: post #17
arthurcolle wrote: post #7

It's a shame that people still use Telegram when Signal is so much better, and has better credentials all around.

Signal has a terrible terrible ux - most people don’t care as much as the HN-er when it comes to security - they want a chat app that just works and is feature rich

I really don't get what people mean when they say this. To me, Signal is pretty indistinguishable from WhatsApp, FB Messenger, even the default SMS app. What about the UX specifically bothers you?
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