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Countless questionable youtube videos, reports of all sorts by people who have no idea what it would entail to perform such a stunt on a large scale.
After googling extensively, I still can't find any real scientific proof that it's either true or on true. It's mostly about some people relating their funny experience and mostly about Facebook saying "No we don't"
Anyone familiar with Charles Proxy would know it's pretty easy to spy on the traffic going from an app to the backend. I work in Facebook advertisement and I've been doing it for various reasons already many times. I've never seen anything that would like a speech datagram, but then again, it wasn't what I was looking for when listening to the Facebook app.
I would expect that given Google and Apple should be scrupulous about what the Facebook app does and doesn't, there should be a host of people who've been looking into that urban legend a number of time. Also the data plan of many people would simply explode too quickly for this to be true.
With my colleagues, we've been wondering if it would be possible to rely on a local text-to-speech engine running on the phone. Needless to say that would drain the battery pretty quickly and the dataset needed in the app would be pretty huge... But is it? And would it really drain the battery? More than Pokemon or the Facebook app...?
Who among you guys is a seasoned user of Charles and could run the experiment a tad further?