> If you’ve never heard of this feature and you suddenly feel the urge to delete your Telegram account forever, let me stress something very important: “People Nearby” is opt-in. By default, no one can see how far away you are on Telegram. You’ll only ever end up in other people’s lists by pressing the “Make Myself Visible” button. If you choose to try it out, remember to disable it once you’re done.
So it's opt-in, even if you don't tell people what it does when you click that button?
The headline is totally accurate - "Modifying Telegram's “People Nearby” feature to pinpoint people's homes"
> 99,999% of Telegram users do not use it.
Given I can see many people around me this is not true, unless the population is around me is orders of magnitude bigger than it is.
As always, it feels like this "discovery", at least for the headline (which, let's be honest, it's what most people read anyway) is based on glancing over the fact that this feature is opt-in, and that 99,999% of Telegram users do not use it. There's nothing in the headline indicating whether this is a critical data leak or simply expected behavior.
Sure, it definitely falls under unexpected usage of the data, but at the end of the day, the data was shared willfully through user action.