Vulnerability in Bumble dating app reveals any user's exact location

"X is a few miles away", "X is less than a,mile away", "X is several yards away" (which is, say, within 30-50 yards) — and more precision is not needed. If users want contact, they need to explicitly coordinate.

This approach, of course, should not be centered on the exact user location, but use some rough and slightly irregular grid, so that the best one could do is to determine the cell of that grid (again, like 50 yards wide), without any idea where in that cell the target user is.

This, and query throttling so that scanning more often than once in 5 minutes isn't possible.

My solution was just to Math.floor both of their lat/lng to be in increments of .25 miles. You could still use the triangulation trick to find that point, but .25 miles seemed like more than enough to obfuscate things.

Had I made the display in increments of miles only, that would have probably been even better.

How exactly would you figure that out? Of course once you have a full working solution it's easy, but how do you distinguish this when you're just tinkering with it?

Within same zip code or two zip codes that border each other? "0 feet to (farthest distance between any two points within zip code(s))"

Zip codes farther apart? "(closest distance between any two points within zip code) to (farthest distance between any two points within zip code)"

No need to limit queries, no need to fuzz anything. No way to triangulate unless one person happens to live at the corner of three or more zip codes, in which case you could just pin them to one zip code as long as they are within a certain range of that zip code.

In areas where zip codes are unusually large (Alaska?) or unusually small (NYC?), you can substitute in some other chunk metric.