Facebook Android app now allows users to control background location tracking

Facebook is adding the ability for users of its Android app to control whether or not it can access their location in the background even when the app is closed.

According to a post on the Facebook Newsroom by the social network's Location Infrastructure Engineering Director Paul McDonald, this move is in order to "give people more choice over how we collect location information and how [Facebook stores] it." This step marks a win for privacy-conscious Android users that still have Facebook on their devices.

McDonald described how this setting will initially be toggled for Android users based on their prior settings: "For people who previously chose to turn their Location History setting 'on,' the new background location setting is 'on.' For people who had turned Location History 'off' – or never turned it on in the first place – the new background location setting is 'off.'"

This feature was already available on devices running on iOS as a feature built into the settings of the Apple operating system, but that sort of granularity wasn't available on the Android Facebook app until now.

Further coverage: Facebook Newsroom The Verge Engadget TechCrunch