Facebook Inc’s development of Messenger marches on as the chat services gets a new chat ID feature to help users identify new contacts on messages from non-friends.

The Messenger app now adds a snippet of publicly shared personal bio information to first time messages, adding identifiers like location and job title. The features works for both non-friends and friends who have never been contacted before. The app will only show information that users would normally be able to view, so any profile info that is made private will not be visible.

Still, even with the privacy limitations, the feature could make it easier for users to figure out if the person messaging them is the friend they met last week or some random spammer.

The new chat ID feature will also try to determine what sort of connection you have with the person messaging you, whether you live in the same city, attended the same school, or any number of other possible connections. The feature is coming in an update today to iOS and Android devices in the U.S., U.K., France and India.

Facebook Messenger’s plans for domination

This feature is yet another step toward Facebook’s goal of building an independent service through Messenger, which includes its own app development platform and other features like video chat and the ability to transfer money to other users.

While Facebook initially turned users off by forcibly splitting chat features from the core Facebook app and requiring users to download Messenger separately, the social network eventually won out. By March 2015, over half of Facebook’s roughly 1.3 billion users were using Messenger, placing it higher than both Twitter and Instagram.

As Messenger continues adding features, it has quickly become a competitor for Facebook’s other popular messaging app, WhatsApp, and it is unclear what direction the social network plans to take regarding the future of each service. Compared to Messenger’s ever growing list of features, WhatsApp remains fairly simple and is popular with younger demographics.

But while WhatsApp also has a few hundred million users of its own, there is likely a fair amount of overlap between the WhatsApp and Messenger user bases.

Screenshot via Messenger.com