Is H3 the right choice for a user community app (with locations)

[notflip]

I want to store (anonimised but close enough) user locations, so that we can do queries like

• How many users are in a 10km range of me
• How far is User X from user Y

Is this what H3 is made for? Or should I just stick with lat/lng calculations for that? I came to H3 because it offers a secure way to store a user location (that's privacy safe)

[nrabinowitz]

Is H3 specifically made for this? No. Is it a good fit? Yes, I think it could work really well. See this notebook for an example implementation: https://observablehq.com/@nrabinowitz/privacy-preserving-spatial-indexing-with-h3

The technique here is a fairly good fit for your use case. Grid cells work well for privacy-preserving location, because you can use progressively larger cells to mask exact coordinates, but it’s generally a good idea to use an additional variable like population to help choose a sufficiently large cell. Then you can convert large cells to their children at some fine resolution to get the benefits of a uniform resolution for joins, etc.