Comment by atmanactive 6 days ago
What about security?
How is this protected from abuse? Why is this all public information?
It feels like a honeypot to be honest.
My suggestion would be to hide the names unless visitor is logged in AND there is a match in their city.
An app that would allow an account to change it's location more than 3 times in a year is a broken app in my book.
People move all the time. People also often have multiple accounts, which they could use to determine which accounts are located where.
Then it would need a GPS-backed proof to allow more location changes while preventing abuse. There's always an intended use case and corner cases which could be handled via support ticket, thus passing through human judgement.
If there is a secure app on your phone, then how can you have multiple accounts?
> hide the names unless visitor is logged in
I hate websites that do this.
People know that what they're putting here will be public, they make the judgment themselves if they're okay with that.
Why do you care if the screen shows 5 people in city X (which is not your city anyway)? What use do you have of knowing exact names of people in city X half way acros the globe?
It is interesting to me and others.
There's a person living in Vila do Corvo. I didn't know that was a place. What are they interested in? What do the technical people of Vila do Corvo post about?
(In this case, not much, but it was fun to find out.)
Exactly. A _person_. That's enough information to satisfy curiosity. No need to publish exact names.
Travel - it seems that if this app takes off, catching up with people as you travel is a solid use case.
I misunderstood then. I thought this is a brand new data collector. Thank you.
In fact, it is a brand new data collector. It's encouraging HN account holders to geo-tag themselves and to put that information in the publicly available HN account profile. This profile is, more or less, blank by default.
That just gives a false sense of security. Someone who means harm would simply set themselves to each city successively, while people believe it to be private (similar to the location feature in dating apps that keeps being broken to find people's exact addresses). Not that I see what harm there is in associating a username with a (nearby) city when one makes that choice consciously, so it's not like the dating app situation where you (1) believe the location will remain secret and (2) it being revealed means your exact address is now known