How to prevent Telegram from tracking your location due to the People Nearby feature

This is a seemingly harmless feature, but it could compromise your privacy.

Let’s explain it to you how to prevent them from tracking your location on Telegram. The app has a People Nearby feature that has been proven to show you people nearby who aren’t in your contacts and pose a risk to your privacy.

This is because a website has been created that uses this data to calculate your exact position with an accuracy of 50 to 100 meters. At first glance, this seems like a harmless feature, but since curious people can use it to determine your location, you may want to disable it if you don’t intend to use it.

This website and the Close-Circuit Telegram Vision or CCTV project use the Telegram API to directly retrieve your location data. This only works when you have this option activated, which in the app only shows the distance to nearby users, which is probably why you want to deactivate it so that no one can use the data to determine your location.

Turn off People Nearby to avoid being tracked.

If you want to avoid being tracked using such an app, you will have to disable function People nearby. To do this, in Telegram, click the menu button at the top left on Android and click on the function People nearby. On iPhone, this feature is located in the Settings tab. Contacts.

Within the function People nearbyyou must click on option

Hide me which will be highlighted in red above the list of users close to you. When you do this, you will no longer share your location and other people nearby will no longer be able to use your data to track you since this feature is disabled.

The feature will be disabled when the option appears make yourself visible above the list of users. So if this option appears, you are safe. Remember that if you have this option enabled, and if your profile picture is public, anyone close to you will be able to see your photo.

Cover image | Dima Solomin

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