[basch]

I would suspect, that if facebook were listening, someone, somewhere would have some amount of evidence. A reverse engineered binary, an emulated program, something making a visible call to a microphone and hashing the words or something.

Based on google being able to identify what song is playing in the room my phone is in, while my phone is in airplane mode, I suspect facebook COULD have a list of a million brand words stored on the phone and their corresponding representation, and tally as you say them and report the tally back, without ever sending the audio itself off the phone. But I would think, after all this suspicion, someone would have some amount of actual evidence of the process itself, and not just the results.

Zuckerberg said the answer was NO in front of congress. That would be a pretty bold lie.