Goodbye to “People Nearby” in Telegram This function disappears among the new changes in the application
Telegram is reacting to the changes after the arrest of its CEO Pavel Durov. The strong accusations that Telegram is facing in its chats not only pirated content, but also gang organization and criminal activities, made the company's policy start to tighten on this. They have already made it clear that its moderators will be able to review private chats, and now another measure has been added: removing one of the application's functions.
The People Nearby feature no longer works. Until now, any user was able to access groups and accounts of people living near them, without revealing their phone numbers. Now, this function has been removed from Telegram , and it cannot be restored even by downgrading to previous versions of the app.
Following a small update on his official Telegram channel , Pavel Durov announced the minor change. “We removed the People Nearby feature, which was used by less than 0.1% of Telegram users , but had problems with bots and scammers,” he explained, adding that it will also be replaced in the future with another option called Business Nearby. It will work in a similar way to its predecessor, and will focus only on businesses.
People Nearby put us in sight of other profiles and groups of people living in the same area as us. It also helped the user to join local groups, as well as meet other people. According to Durov, this function was not used by very many people, and it also gave bandwidth to scammers or bots to harass users.
So the removal of this feature shouldn’t cause too much of a stir among those who use Telegram . What is clear is that this app will never be the same again, and it will no longer be a stronghold for those who consume pirated content, for profit.