Stan Chudnovsky, Facebook’s head of product management for messaging products, said that Facebook Messenger does not receive location information about you unless location services are enabled on your phone for the app. According to him the Facebook Messenger app does not gather location data in the background and does not ask for new permissions for your information. The new feature is active in both Android and iOS devices, to disable location tracking on your Android smartphone, go to Settings > Location sharing and switch it to off. In iPhone, iPad or iPod Shuffle, you can configure your location by visiting Settings > Privacy > Location > Services. You can check whether your Facebook Messenger sends location by visiting your FB Messenger Chat threads. If the location tracking is enabled that it is indicated by a blue arrow icon pointing northeast.

Facebook kills automatic location tracking but lets users share locations on Facebook Messenger - 37