Telegram users can be located very precisely. If the “people near you” function is activated, chat partners can see the distance between the participants. The direction is still unclear. If a user wants to know more precisely where someone else is, this is possible using triangulation. Put simply, he only has to make several queries from different locations and can use the respective radius to limit where someone is.

The information on the distance that Telegram releases is fairly exact, so the circle can be drawn quite tightly. In order to make the various queries, you would have to move quickly to different measuring points yourself. But there is another way, as for example Android Police writes: For example, there are fake GPS apps that pretend to be somewhere else. In this way, it would also be possible to find out where someone is talking to from the sofa. Namely where the radii, which can be easily drawn in a map service, overlap. Not only could individuals determine locations with it, profiles could also be created on a large scale.

Telegram advertises that it is particularly secure and private. The “Nearby” function is intended to bring people together more easily, for example at events, the provider wrote when the function was introduced. There are also “groups in the vicinity”. The messenger is currently under discussion because right-wing groups exchange information there.

Other services, similar location function Distances are also passed on to other apps. Here, too, conclusions can be drawn about whereabouts. With the dating app Lovoo, the location of individual people could be determined to a 30 meter after tests by the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation. This was even possible in large numbers via the API, i.e. for all users in the vicinity. While Lovoo gives the distances in 100 – meter steps, with Tinder 1000 -Meter, which makes the determination significantly less precise.

(emw)