title: Architecture/design suggestion on Cloudant geospatial usage
body: <p>Cloudant seems to check off nearly all of what we're looking for for our app, but from playing around with it for a bit, I did have a design roadblock.</p>
  
  <p>Our app has a need to pull up the X nearest users nearby. I noticed that there is geo querying available both directly and on top of general search in Cloudant. However, we want to protect our users' location and as such would like a way to query distance from a point, but have results returned with no geo data attached.</p>
  
  <p>I was looking for a way to incorporate a "reduce" on top of the geoindex to filter out sensitive data but that does not seem to exist.</p>
  
  <p>I also know that we could make a server that handles the queries and strips out geo data before returning to the client, but one of the greatest draws of Cloudant was it's Offline First syncing directly from the app side to the DB.</p>
  
  <p>Some location based tutorials involved using Envoy to segment user data (<a href="https://developer.ibm.com/clouddataservices/2016/06/14/location-tracker-part-1-offline-first/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://developer.ibm.com/clouddataservices/2016/06/14/location-tracker-part-1-offline-first/</a>). That seems to be the direction we want to go, but it's still not exactly it, since users still aren't exposed to each other at all whereas we want everything except for geo data to be available across users.</p>
  
  <p>Do you have a suggestion on how to approach this with Cloudant? </p>