• by Gavin O'Malley , June 5, 2015

Amid growing privacy concerns, Facebook is rethinking how Messenger users should share their physical locations with friends and family. Instead of “always-on” location sharing, the social giant is now encouraging people to send their current or planned coordinates in a distinct message.

“Now you can choose to explicitly send a map of your location or another particular place as a separate message,” Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for Messenger at Facebook, writes in a new blog post.

The point, said Chudnovsky, is to give users “full control over when and how you share your location information.” “You only send a location when you tap on the location pin and then choose to send it as a separate message.”

While not directly addressed by Chudnovsky, privacy is clearly top-of-mind for Facebook. The company is currently trying to resolve a dispute with consumers who are suing it for allegedly violating wiretap laws by scanning the “private” message that users send to each other.

Facebook clearly has big plans for Messenger. Last month, it officially turned the service into a platform for developers to directly distribute their apps to Messenger’s roughly 600 million users.

“By opening up Messenger as a platform, we’re going to help people express themselves in new ways,” Zuckerberg told attendees of Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference, last month.

With the big Messenger changes, Facebook is following the lead of Line and other platforms, which have been redefining the definition of a messaging service. Some in the industry see Facebook’s focus on Messenger as a bit defensive.

“Messenger is Facebook’s answer to the growing concern of the younger generation abandoning Facebook, the social network, for messaging apps like Snapchat,” Greg Ratner, director of technology at Deep Focus, recently told Social Media & Marketing Daily.

Defensive or not, Facebook has recently sought to bolster Messenger with a growing list of features. It also recently added a peer-to-peer -- or friend-to-friend -- money transfer service to Messenger.