This has been publicly posted & discussed so this isn't exactly a big secret anymore.
Recon is making it very easy for someone to track down your actual physical location, to within ~10-20 meters, using trilateration. This is one part of how GPS works. For a really good overview, I recommend Bartosz Ciechanowski's excellent blog post about GPS, which starts off with a great explainer on trilateration.
Granted, trilateration has been an issue for every location based app. Grindr still has this problem as of 2025, and researchers have found many other apps vulnerable to the same same technique. People within the community have been making a fuss about this for a long time, ever since we first started using these apps on our phones.
What I find particularly troubling about Recon's mistake is two things. First, everyone on Recon is (mostly) there earnestly; we're all weird fuckin kinky people looking for other weird fuckin kinky people. Despite what their marketing materials say, (🚨 PERSONAL OPINION ALERT 🚨) Recon is not a hookup[1] app, and very few people are there on the dl[2]. Contrast this with Grindr, which is crawling with "straight" dudes full of internalized homophobia, or being trolled by politicians while they line up to vote in favor of throwing puppies into woodchippers or whatever.
The second issue I take with this is that it's an easy fix. Just fudge the numbers a little bit! Don't give my exact distance, round it to the nearest hundred meters. Or add ± 50 meters. Or clamp the coordinates of the dropped pin on the location page. Or use an alternative grid system with less granularity like H3 or Geocodes. I really don't think Recon's core userbase is clammoring to know who's within 50 meters of them.
Anyway, mitigation steps. Uh. "Check in" on Recon somewhere that isn't a sensitive location, e.g. a parking lot, or even better, a city that isn't your hometown. Once that's set, disable Recon's location access in your phone's settings and don't turn it back on. If you're using the non-app version, I don't know how that works. There's also probably a way to manually set your location, but I haven't looked into that extensively.
Don't forget to vote with your wallets either. Cancel your premium subscriptions. Multiple people (including me) have contacted Recon about this privacy issue and gotten nothing but radio silence. As with most everything else in this world, money talks.