Facebook Messenger Now Only Shares Your Location When You Ask It To

Facebook Messenger Now Only Shares Your Location When You Ask It To

Last week, we mentioned that Facebook Messenger shares your location with every message, granting some people access to that information via a Chrome extension. Facebook changed things today so you only share your location if you choose to send it in its own separate message.

While it was fairly easy to turn off the location sharing feature in Messenger before, a lot of people were unaware that Messenger logged your location with each message in the first place. Now location sharing really is completely optional because you can only send your location if you tap the More icon (the three dots), followed by the location pin. That will send a map of your location in its own separate message. Facebook also makes it very clear that your location data is not being gathered at all unless you choose to use the location sharing feature:

Messenger does not get location information from your device in the background — only each time you select a location and tap Send when you use the Messenger app. We are not requesting any new permissions for your information.

This means you have complete control of whether you want to share your location at all. If you don’t ever use the pinned location functionality, Messenger won’t ever log your location. You can still share your location, but only when and where you choose. Still, this probably won’t delete old location info. Someone might still be able to track your previous locations if you had location tracking enabled before, so keep that in mind.

A New Way to Send a Location In Messenger [Facebook Newsroom]


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