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Every user has an unique ID.
Every message sent on Telegram could be related to an user account...even if it has been deleted (the user ID remains the same even after the account is deleted)!
In addition user IDs could be used (and ARE USED) to track groups a particular user has joined (that's even easier with public groups), name & nickname user changes etc.
The data you can gain throughout user IDs is astonishing and it could be sufficient to profile a person.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
(these two solutions aren't mutually exclusive and could be implemented together)
1. Each account has an ID that allows you to distinguish it from other accounts. Removing IDs from deleted accounts would break many things. Most importantly, you would not be able to distinguish two separated chats with deleted accounts, retrieve and delete old messages or simply remove them from groups.
2. This proposed solution is chaotic, expensive, really complicated and wouldn't work with the Telegram ecosystem (because of usernames and user mentions). If you consider how many resources would be involved, this is certainly impossible.
There are currently over 1.8 billion account on Telegram (active accounts + deleted accounts). Consider that anybody can join a maximum of 500 supergroups/channels and an infinite number of normal groups. Moreover, you can join and leave an infinite amount of groups.
In an optimistic scenario, if you consider the current user amount, this would mean that 1.8*10^9 * 500 = 900 BILLION different IDs are mapped to 1.8 billion users. Since Telegram is growing day by day at an insane speed, this number would increase exponentially. Do you have any idea how many resources and how much computation power would be needed to do this?
That's really simple to say but extremely difficult to do, especially if you're under an oppressive government and you want to communicate with people outside of it.
The first layer of security must be provided by Telegram.
"You should delete them before deleting your account, since you can always delete your messages before leaving a group"
1) Telegram allows you to delete 100 message per time (selecting them one-by-one), that makes the procedure extremely slow and discouraging.
2) What about 'joining announcement ' messages and groups in which I'm banned (or groups that for any reason I have no more access to)?
3)Telegram Privacy Policy [1] says: "In supergroups and channels, deleting a message removes it for all participants." What about 'normal groups'?
[1] https://telegram.org/privacy#10-2-messages
2) Indeed, I said "I don't know if this could be implemented but...". Currently, only a Telegram developer could give us an answer.
One solution that I can imagine: Telegram could allow each phone number to create maybe three accounts. The process would be: Create first account, then from there tell Telegram to create your sub accounts. They can then be chosen by the normal account switcher already present in the Telegram apps. This would be realtively easy to realize, would not break things and would raise the amount of privacy.
Another solution which I would suggest is to just create a few telegram accounts and split different matters wisely. But your proposed solution is garbage - sorry.
Telegram had to be built competely different from the beginning to do
this (userprofiles, mentions etc)"
Not having the sources we cannot be sure about this, maybe it can be easily solved from the server side. This is just another reason to free the sources of it: https://bugs.telegram.org/c/728
Your idea is good, but is not an absolute solution*...the issues remain it only tries to reduce them.
*it has been suggested here: https://bugs.telegram.org/c/6644