I can't prove whether or not the Facebook app is listening and reporting back to the mothership, however I do know that I've seen my battery life more than double since I deleted the FB app and switched to using the mobile website (which is extremely well implemented, btw) instead.
After removing the FB app, FB Messenger app, Instagram (which I never used anyway) and WhatsApp (ditto), I've gone from 20-30 hours between charges to 60-70 hours between charges. This is on an iPhone 6 that admittedly isn't used for much more than SMS, RSS, music in the car, and light browsing. Now, I can't say with certainty that removing those apps removed any battery-hogging 24/7 microphone monitoring, but no matter what it's clear the FB apps were draining the battery. Again, I'm still accessing FB just as much as I did before (about twice a day, for about 10 minutes at a time) but it's via the web browser.
Also, my data use has dropped, though not as significantly as battery life; where I was using about 1.5GB of data per month, now I'm just under 1GB/month (estimated based on the ~450MB used in the two weeks I've been FB-free)
This is one of the reasons I won't install them. The other is I have severe privacy concerns well before any idea that it might be listening - FB are always trying to scrape more data from you anyway, letting them have access to lots more by being resident on the phone seems a bad plan.
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I can't prove whether or not the Facebook app is listening and reporting back to the mothership, however I do know that I've seen my battery life more than double since I deleted the FB app and switched to using the mobile website (which is extremely well implemented, btw) instead.
After removing the FB app, FB Messenger app, Instagram (which I never used anyway) and WhatsApp (ditto), I've gone from 20-30 hours between charges to 60-70 hours between charges. This is on an iPhone 6 that admittedly isn't used for much more than SMS, RSS, music in the car, and light browsing. Now, I can't say with certainty that removing those apps removed any battery-hogging 24/7 microphone monitoring, but no matter what it's clear the FB apps were draining the battery. Again, I'm still accessing FB just as much as I did before (about twice a day, for about 10 minutes at a time) but it's via the web browser.
Also, my data use has dropped, though not as significantly as battery life; where I was using about 1.5GB of data per month, now I'm just under 1GB/month (estimated based on the ~450MB used in the two weeks I've been FB-free)
This is one of the reasons I won't install them. The other is I have severe privacy concerns well before any idea that it might be listening - FB are always trying to scrape more data from you anyway, letting them have access to lots more by being resident on the phone seems a bad plan.