When it comes to data privacy, Facebook (FB  ) has left a sour taste in many consumers mouths. Whether the social media company is coming under scrutiny for a recent breach in December that saw the potential exposure of 267 million users' contact information, the lawsuit the company is under for a cyber attack that left 29 million accounts open to hackers, the fact that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been told in the past by Senate to sell Instagram and Whatsapp if he actually wanted to protect consumer data, or the company's shady political ad past, many have been skeptical of the company in terms of trusting it with data security.

Recently, Google (GOOGL  ) and Apple (AAPL  ) have updated their operating systems to give users more control and insight into which apps can access their location. This action led Facebook to release a blog post that detailed to users that even though users have the option to opt out of letting Facebook collect their location data, the app still has ways to view it.

In response to the blog post and privacy concerns, U.S. Senators Christopher A Coons and Josh Hawley wrote a letter addressed to Zuckerberg. The two asked Zuckerberg to explain how Facebook collects data from users then their location settings are limited to in-app use or turned off entirely. They also asked the company whether its uses to location data from users who have restricted Facebook's access and share the information to third parties or to target ads.

"If a user has decided to limit Facebook's access to his or her location, Facebook should respect these privacy choices," the statement concluded.

In response, a representative from Facebook addressed the senators' concerns by stating that it is the company's mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. The company's mission seemed to leave out the entirety of the tech empire's business model: to advertise.

In the response letter, Facebook clarifies that it tracks users' locations in three ways: when a user enable their location services, through the user's activity, and the IP address the user signs on from. When a user enables location services, their device will use a combination of GPS, WI-Fi networks, and Bluetooth beacon signals to determine their location. This is the most accurate method used to determine a user's location. It is through the other two methods that are the user's activity and IP address that has become the privacy issue.

Using the user's activity to determine location even if the user has opted out of location services is a bit of a grey area when it comes to privacy concerns. User's may give the social network clues to their location through uploads of a location-tagged post, check-ins, responses to events, and other activities. Facebook use of the user's IP address on the other hand is more of a privacy concern, for the unique address often reflects the user's location. Though the information could be inaccurate, this type of locating is used by Facebook to target advertisements to the users that did not want the app to track them through location services.