The worst part of the Facebook/Oculus integration is that there's no way to log out--you can't even revoke the login remotely via the Facebook settings page which can do that for any other device--so anyone who has access to your headset has access to your Facebook account and your Messenger history, forever.
With Quest 1, which had a separate account system, I would frequently show off the headset by letting people try it on. With Quest 2, anyone who tries it on would have full access to my Facebook account and Messenger history, so I can't do that. And no, they don't give you any sort of warning about this, you have to figure it out yourself.
(I reported this to their bug bounty program on October 26. The submission was rejected as a duplicate. I rechecked today and it was still not fixed.)
Clearly not being able to log out is a feature, not a bug. Mother Facebook is looking out for you by ensuring you're incentivized not to share your hardware with other people. After all, who knows what nefarious things they might do to it! And you wouldn't even be able to hang out with them in VR! If they wanted a headset, they should just get their own.
But, you might say, what if they can't afford to get their own Oculus? Facebook, aren't you just limiting your own audience by having this policy? Trust us, we've thought of everything.
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I don't see Facebook alone in this. The whole gaming industry is headed this direction. Most of my game purchases are in Steam. PS5 has a digital only version.
There's a difference between forcing you to use a gaming account for a gaming service, and forcing you to use a social media account entirely irrelevant to gaming with your entire real-life identity (and web history, ad profiling, and in-store purchases) to use a gaming service.
It may not be enforced, but the Microsoft ToS states "You agree not to use any false, inaccurate or misleading information when signing up for your Microsoft account." (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/servicesagreement/), and the signup flow does require a full name.
I don't see too much that Facebook collects about you that Steam doesn't. If you aren't using a Facebook desktop app Steam probably knows quite a bit more about you actually.
If you are really concerned about your "real-life identity" I'd recommend not publishing it in a service that is made for public consumption
In addition many physical copies, if not most or all, mostly are either straight up a redemption for an online key or are functionally telling your system to go download it.
Optical drives haven’t been standard issue in PCs for a while now.
We need to allow multiple app stores with DRM per store, it's the only solution to avoid a monopolistic store that I see. It won't happen except through the legal system, I think.
If you see enough UX flows you would probably less surprised that an essential feature is 1 missing, 2 inaccessible.
A professor of architecture used to ask the question at senior presentations: “where is the door?”. People should have heard him ask that question before and yet somehow people forgot to include something as practical and fundamental as door in their elaborate models. It’s not like these people are idiots, they’re just regular people who have other priorities and are trying to get things out the door before the next review cycle.
Ugh I had a CAD architecture class in engineering school and the final project was to design a restaurant and we did an amazing job building the best restaurant in the world until the teacher asked... where's the kitchen?
Whoops. We got so excited about the pool table and the bar and the reception area that we forgot the only thing that makes a restaurant actually a restaurant... a place to cook food.
I hate to say it but that means your design also failed to consider the foot traffic to and from the kitchen which also affects the dining experience :-) designing stuff can be hard...
I'm sorry but there is no way that facebook "didn't think about logging out." They thought about it and decided they didn't want to implement it, whatever the reason is may be up for dispute but, they definitely thought about it.
The lengths some people are willing to go to absolve FB of wrongdoing here are pretty incredible. Concretely, I'm sure the problem has been brought up plenty of times by plenty of people. However, the log out button got clogged up in the phlogiston at FB and they're having a hell of a time looking for it!
I suspect they were so caught up in the idiotic idea that you have to be logged in to Facebook to use the thing that they figured logging out would just make the thing useless, so why allow that? It still seems like having multiple users should have been thought about.
much as it is trendy, you really have to think past the binary $company good/evil argument.
My argument is as follows:
1) there is no logout button for your oculus account. Its not a flow that already exists. You need to factory-reset your device to log out.
2) the team that was put in charge of linking FB accounts to oculus are not the same team that owns the home screen gui.
3) working between teams is a hard problem
4) adding a logout flow is a boat load of work, because the rift os was never designed to do logging out, because why would you need to log out of an oculus device, barring cockups?
Personally I think its a mistake to force linking accounts. I can see why they want it, it makes future multiplayer and AR integrations better.
If anything I think the fact that organizations have an emergent "collective mind" that is semi-independent from any individual suggests that organizations should be held to an even higher standard of behavior than they have been.
To be fair, I think the emergent "collective mind" is likely far stupider more instinctual than the minds of the individuals. (hence why considering incentive structures is important)
That aside, I agree that yes, organizations should be held to a higher standard than they have been.
That doesn't really matter. Facebook has more than used up its credit of trust. Anyone that is not suspicious when FB messes up yet again hasn't paid attention to what they're up to.
I really don't understand why so many people would finance a headset instead of just setting the cash aside in a stable investment and owning 12 months later.
For immediate necessities like a car or mobile phone I get it, but a VR headset isn't a necessity. Own later instead of financing. You might even be able to buy used at half price in 12 months.
And that release will introduce a "bug" where the microphone will always be on. A totally unrelated bug will release advertising metrics from the audio and headset user login history to advertisers. They'll fix the bugs but unwittingly cause...
I'm more in agreement with you here. imo This is more a stupidity and not malice situation, but the other side has plenty of valid points, most of which is from Facebook's own history. They're not a good actor historically and the best way to predict the future is to look at history.
The best most ironic part of the forced Facebook login is that you still have to manually add your Facebook friends as your Oculus friends. Unlike with IG, it doesn't even suggest your Facebook friends to be friends. If adding Facebook friends who joined Oculus was automatic, at least you can argue there was immediate utility, but as of right now it feels like they're just signalling that FB will watch your every move and spy on you.
As a person without a facebook account, I feel locked out of many things I shouldn't be.
Oculus is a small example, but I shouldn't be forced to have one to be notified of my town council meetings, for instance. I realize now that the way the open web died was FB making it super easy to create walled off websites for people, vs real websites.
Facebook really did and does fill a need that's been open for a very long time: a central communications/notification platform. It's been tried time and time again, with both open standards and closed standards, but Facebook is the one that caught on (very unfortunately).
For a few years I ran a successful business in my small-but-bustling town of using the Facebook Events API to pull in all the events in the area and putting them on a single calendar, then pushing those events back to my business's Facebook page before the event started. At that point everyone in town can either visit my website or follow my Facebook page, and now they have one central place to get all the town's news. I could never convince business owners to put all their events on my site directly, because "our audience is all on Facebook already" but people would have to follow a couple dozen pages and check them each individually (because Facebook won't show you everything you've followed).
Facebook eventually shut down that API (with no notice, against their own SLAs) and I kept scraping the data by hand because the residents and the businesses found it so useful. Then the pandemic hit and these small businesses had no money to pay me and they weren't holding events anymore anyway. But even after we're done with the pandemic I doubt I'll be picking it back up because Facebook is an abusive business partner to begin with, and the people you're then forced to interact with on Facebook are some of the worst and most toxic human beings I've ever met. I've had death threats from my own neighbors because an event I advertised was sold out. I've had Facebook followers stop me on the street and complain to me about taxes and zoning because they can't tell the difference between a news outlet and the city government.
But it really does highlight that Facebook is meeting a demand that nothing else, not email or RSS or SMS or anything has been able to meet. It's just a shame that they're the worst possible company to make a social network that you'd actually want to interact with.
The Quest OS is Android based and multiple accounts in Android is still kind of buggy and niche.
Game purchases are per user account not per device, which means you'd need to redownload any games anyway? It not really set up with the same kind of simplicity an Xbox or Playstation has as far as account tracking goes.
Its not really an excuse but I could see why there are problems to solve with it and they might have just deprioritized it. You can still wipe and re-login and re-download but that's a pain.
I get the idea that the device can only know about one account at a time, but it's absurd that you can't do a factory reset on the hardware and then revoke the credentials from your FB account. ("I no longer own this hardware...", or "my Oculus was stolen".)
I mean, I think the worst part is the implicit loss of privacy baked into tying the accounts and the eventual data goldmine VR/AR will be for FB.
I think you're complaint is valid and I'm sure you don't mean it this way but... comments like this rub me wrong because that can be fixed with a better system, and likely will when enough people complain. It gets in the way of sharing and spreading VR which I'm sure they want to do.
Once it's fixed it will be another step on the path to saying "well FB's privacy in VR isn't as bad as it used to be!" and that's the road to acceptance.
Idk where this comes from, you absolutely can. Hardware factory reset on Oculus Quest devices (both 1 and 2) is a thing. I did it myself last month, as I was giving away my Quest 1 headset, it is pretty simple.
It would be extremely strange if that wasn't possible.
> The worst part of the Facebook/Oculus integration is that there's no way to log out--you can't even revoke the login remotely via the Facebook settings page which can do that for any other device--so anyone who has access to your headset has access to your Facebook account and your Messenger history, forever.
I guess the solution to this is obvious: delete your facebook account if your Oculus is lost or stolen... I might be inclined to just delete my Facebook altogether if I were an Oculus owner.
This makes me wonder, what does happen if you're logged in to Quest 2 with your Facebook account, and then you delete your Facebook profile? Do you lose access to the Quest? Do you get a fresh device? Do you get to keep your purchases, since I assume the purchases are now linked to your Facebook account?
If this separates Oculus into it's own company I'd probably buy one of the new headsets. The things Facebook is doing here definitely detracts from the product. I don't have to give Logitech my drivers license to plug in a mouse.
> I don't have to give Logitech my drivers license to plug in a mouse
Reminds me of how Nvidia's Geforce Experience application requires you to create an account with them just for the convenience of auto-updating your graphics card driver. This "experience" sure doesn't feel right to me, so I update those drivers manually.
Companies are really trying everything they can think of to get more of your information, even if it's just an email address.
This is particularly funny when you consider that Windows Update will automatically update your graphics drivers once they go through WHQL. Manually installing drivers from Nvidia's website is actually a user experience downgrade, since Windows Update won't touch graphics drivers you pull in yourself.
For the record: I ended up biting the bullet with Geforce Experience regardless, because of the other features they had on offer that were tied to the app. It left a bad taste in my mouth and I ultimately dropped Nvidia cards entirely for AMD. Switching to AMD in turn made dropping Windows easier! (arch user btw)
It's extra hilarious since Geforce Experience is an electron app you can just path out the login window yourself and be on your way :)
https://github.com/Moyster/BaiGfe
What? That's awesome. I don't really care that much about having an account but the Geforce Experience app requires me to re-login every few months and I always have trouble remembering the password. It's just a hassle all the time.
Windows update failed to get the newest Nvidia drivers that were pushed out ahead of Cyberpunk 2077. I had to manually download them to get the game to stop crashing.
I really despise that you need to login for it, especially as it used to be optional. I wanted to try remote play on a psvita[1] but did not want to so someone has made a thing to let you use geforce experience without a login[2] and i found it worked reasonably well.
Well, they are very different devices. The Quest is currently a one of a kind device when it comes to ease of use and setup.
(Which makes it doubly annoying to me the Facebbok tie in. I adored the Quest one but I sent it back for a refund due to Facebook's ridiculous decision not to allow multiple user accounts. A device which I'm not using 95% of my time cannot easily be shared with other family members?! Utter madness. /rant)
Tell that to Magic Leap. Private investors don't have 5-10 year horizons for plowing money into R&D to eventually see if it gets somewhere. This is a multi-billion dollar yearly capital commitment
Oculus couldn't survive by itself. It's possible that Microsoft, Samsung, Apple or someone else would purchase them, but I believe that with Oculus the best possible outcome is for them to role back anti-consumer (required FB login and especially all the policies that come with that) and anti-developer (actually blocking apps they believe compete with them) practices
Do we know how expensive it is to maintain and how much it earns? It probably spends more than the PSVR division at Sony or the Vive division at HTC, but the Quest is quite popular and, if reviews are anything to go by, very close to making VR "mainstream". I'm not convinced it couldn't survive off investor money for a while until it becomes profitable. Silicon Valley is no stranger to unprofitable companies living off investments for years and years after all.
Oculus is not just a display, but a computer with a GUI and an app store, so it's more like having to log in to Apple to use an iPad. Not sure you really have to log in if you don't use the Oculus app store.
The difference is that Apple, and Microsoft for that matter, don't give a shit about knowing who I am. They may want data here and there (moreso microsoft), but if you want to give them a fake email address and a fake name, you can march ahead with your device just fine.
Facebook wants to stick it's eyeball tendrils up my butt before they deign to allow me to use hardware I purchased from them.
This. The only "big tech" company that's ever asked for official identification (out of the blue, wouldn't let me login otherwise) has been Facebook. Going back to the original comment:
> I don't have to give Logitech my drivers license to plug in a mouse.
This sounds like hyperbole but it's a very real comparison.
How else are they going to make money? And I'm not sure that there's much valuable data from Oculus usage to be sold and repackaged to advertisers through facebook
Quite a few horror stories on the forums/reddit of people having their facebook account banned for "no reason" which then locks them out of their Quest and all of their purchases. It can still be used with the link cable to a computer, but is otherwise basically bricked.
Buying one if you don't have a facebook account is even worse, you have to create one which they inevitably decide is a bot and then ban it.
The funny thing is Oculus reps (now deleted) telling people to create a separate Facebook account for Oculus, and those accounts getting permanently banned with no recourse because it's against Facebook's ToS to have multiple accounts.
You can skip the Google account entirely on Android and everything still works more or less (more than a few nag screens, probably worth rooting if you go this direction).
There are alternative app stores and actually, the ones I've tried have worked pretty well. There is a way to get play store working but you'd be violating ToS technically.
This has not been my experience for either of my last two Android phones, Google would not create an account without verifying a phone number. Their support forum recommended using a land line or borrowing a friend's phone.
That's sad to hear. The situation with smartphones is magnitudes worse than VR headsets. First, VR headsets have competitive consumer-respecting alternatives (Valve Index), second, they are for now purely an entertainment device, while smartphones are semi-required to competitively function in modern society. I'm surprised no government has yet tried to address the harmful smartphone OS duopoly, the only worthwhile initiatives are from unbacked Open-Source hackers.
> Buying one if you don't have a facebook account is even worse, you have to create one which they inevitably decide is a bot and then ban it.
Twitter does a similar thing: they'll lock your account and
demand your real phone number before you can get access again.
Luckily it really was a throwaway-account in my case that I
created for a random mobile game, but it's still a horrible
practice - same with Microsoft's email service, which also may
lock you out one day until you enter and verify your phone number.
My past experience with this sort of thing from the other side of the fence makes me fully expect most of the people complaining the loudest about being banned for "no reason" were probably actually banned because they harassed someone or said something super racist.
Sure, but they still paid for a physical product. If I actually own something in the truest sense of the word then a company shouldn't get to have any say over my continued use of the device, games etc regardless of what entirely abhorrent positions I might hold. That's the perks of being a private citizen.
IMO we need strong regulation against this type of interference passed the sphere of the original transaction. Large COs are trying to make us all renters. Fuck that.
While I'm pretty pro-corporate this is the ticket issue that grinds my gears.
Actually this is not true, you should familiarize yourself with this particular scenario. Reviewers and game developers have had their devices bricked for creating new accounts to use on them. This was especially bad during the election period as FB was pretty much banning all new accounts then.
I've had my Facebook account for > 10 years, but use it sparingly. It was locked for "suspicious activity" the exact moment I linked my Oculus account to my Facebook account. It gave me two options to unlock it: link my Facebook account with a google account, or send in some pictures of a government ID for verification. I don't believe that the act of linking two, required, accounts on the first day the device was publicly available, before my first experience with VR, is somehow racist or objectionable.
That’s likely. But is it your opinion that, e.g. Toyota is within its rights to brick your car if you post, e.g. Holocaust denial posts on their owners forums?
That behavior is abhorrent, but this seems like a weird extrajudicial punishment vector.
I’m all for private corps policing their network, but bricking your devices seems like a whole other thing.
This really needs to go farther. As a purchaser of any product, I should not need to create an Internet account with the manufacturer, in order to use or continue to use a product. Once I buy it, it should be mine. I don't want to have this ongoing relationship with your company. This trend of companies making you tether yourselves to them in order to use a product you paid for has to end. I'm not a huge fan of regulating tech, but need some kind of "Right To Use" law that says once you buy something, it's yours and you don't need to connect to the manufacturer to use it, and the manufacturer can't revoke your right to use it.
I can't be banned by my power company or my water company. Perhaps if Facebook wants their login to be treated as an essential service for multiple products, they should be regulated like a utility...
I expect that's what they want. Oauth logins could be regulated by government in a similar fashion to mobile spectrums and it won't be easy for competitors to pop up.
Well, we already have Google fiber and Google phone service. So there are some utilities you can get banned from because of happy birthday playing in the background of a YouTube video or something...
There is a need to begin calling out Facebook and Google employees directly for their role in harming society, especially because they seem ready to rise up whenever one of their peers is mistreated.
What would be your strategy for holding a mirror to these people and to make these jobs undesirable?
Why don’t we call out bank employees for all the fraud and deception leading up to the 2008 crash? Car makers and oil companies employees for polluting the earth? Farmers for allowing run off into rivers? Pharma employees for relentlessly jacking up prices and pill mills poising countless people?
The reality is most employees have virtually zero impact on the direction of their company. The Zuckerbergs of this world will retreat to their private island estates in Hawaii till any backlash blows over.
If only employees had some way of joining their collective voices to create an actual power structure that could bargain with executives and shareholders.
Probably a bad idea though, we should just keep assuming that the founders lucky enough to reach critical mass will do the right thing for the world even when they are incentivized not to.
>Why don’t we call out bank employees for all the fraud and deception leading up to the 2008 crash? Car makers and oil companies employees for polluting the earth?
a lot of people complain about those all the time. In Iceland they even put them into prison.
>The reality is most employees have virtually zero impact on the direction of their company
I don't think that's true. Software workers, in particular at those large companies in senior positions wield quite a lot of influence. It's right that they're not owners of the firm, but they're in short supply and they command a lot of power. That said, even your average lowly developer has a very simple choice to have more than zero impact. Don't help them build these systems.
Agreed -- though likely to be a minority opinion on here unfortunately.
Although I do feel for those who began at Google when they still ascribed to the Don't Be Evil mantra -- at some point you have a responsibility to look around you and recognize the work you're doing has become part of the problem.
What are you even saying? Facebook and Google engineers are just writing code, just like (presumably) you. Very few of them make any key decisions, and most of them work on good things. For every engineer working on disallowing FB signout on oculus, there are 10 writing tools for small businesses to more easliy share their pages, helping people stay in contact with loved ones.
We (rightly) don't go after Northrop Grumman engineers when the US decides to bomb Yemen. Put down your pitchfork and show some compassion.
Compassion is the reverse of what you're thinking. If you make bombs in modern day you're a murderer. We have no active world war, no real threat to our borders, and any basic level of research shows those bombs are used for proxy wars over resources and land in foreign continents. If youre in a position to design bombs you're in a position to work anywhere else too. No excuses for behavior.
Provide evidence that were at any risk of WW3. In the U.S. Those bombs are exclusively used for proxy wars and are made in significant abundance to continue that "war". They're not for any other purpose. If your intent is actual defense, sure, but we don't have that reason.
Outside of the US, many (perhaps most) educated and politically-aware Westerners do look down on people involved in the Military-Industrial Complex.
Nobody civilized wants to "go after" them of course, but make no mistake - it's not something you'd want to brag about while overseas if you're trying to make friends.
This is true even in friendly places like Europe, Canada or Japan. Make of that what you will.
Working for Google and Facebook is often a choice, with a highly desirable outcome. People rarely become engineers at Facebook because they just couldn't find a job at a different company.
Those engineers could decide to build similar tools at a company that does not aid, you know, genocide. Those engineers could also decide to not continue working for a company that normalizes mass surveillance.
When you decide to work on your awesome things at companies like Facebook and Google, you are propping up megacorps that harm society, and that's your choice.
Regarding compassion, I'm looking forward to the next mass walkout of Facebook engineers, condemning the spread of hate and violence that their employee enables.
I have a (good faith) question for you: since it seems as though many large corporations accumulate skeletons and incentivize negative behavior, is your position effectively against large corporations? Or is there a counterexample? Is this a complaint against the FB(/IG/SNAP/whatever) style feed, or do you feel this is endemic to any communication platform at scale?
It’s always interesting when I see HN on the verge of grasping the importance of worker solidarity. Ironically by following political philosophies of “self” empowerment, tech workers have ceded all real power to their majority investors.
You’re both right, but your argument is one logical jump away from “they were just doing their jobs”
This won’t get positive traction here but whatever: I was in an elevator in Austin a few years ago for a conference.
Older guy, mid 50’s maybe, gets on and says “oh are you a googler?” Me: “Are you? Him: “Yeah I’m in XXXX group” Me: “That’s disgusting, Google is an evil company and you should quit”.
Dude was visibly shocked, and I got off the elevator and never saw him again. If more people told the employees of surveillance capitalism company’s just how terrible they are for working for them they’d have a lot harder time recruiting.
There is a clear reason - to make them uncomfortable. Nobody forced them to work there, and it is obvious to everyone what kind of future they are building there. If you exchange your soul for a good paycheck, this is just what you get.
The alternative is "Oh, you work at Schutzstaffel? That's cool!". That he has done is morally correct.
Google has an absolute overabundance of people lining up to work for them. Telling the moral people that they should quit just results in a company filled with amoral people.
"I should not need to create an Internet account with the manufacturer, in order to use or continue to use a product. "
This is a nice sentiment, but probably not possible given the reality of the interconnected nature of everything. The tech generally 'needs' the internet to work.
The issues are:
1) FB requires your so-called 'real identity' which is something fundamentally different than an e-mail address.
2) Related to 1, they ban a lot, for various reasons. Those things nee to be disentangled.
I wonder if the US/DE regulators are going to be smart enough to do something specific because if their redress is too wide, their going to put a zillion businesses in a very grey area.
Banning accounts that are the sole way a user has to access things they have 'purchased' should be made illegal. If that causes problems because it's also tied to a social media account, then that's an argument for social media companies keeping it separate.
Imagine if a car I'd bought stopped working because I stuck a 'Find my lost cat' poster up somewhere it wasn't supposed to be.
No it does not. Most games are not multiplayer games and don't require accounts.
> Downloading games is greatly enhanced by accounts.
It's greatly enhanced by accounts _with the application vendor_ not the device manufacturer. I'd be quite upset if AMD required an account to be able to download Steam games. I _was_ quite upset when a(n offline only) game I bought on Steam required a Games for Windows Live account I didn't was.
> There is nothing anti-privacy about an 'account'. Someone having an arbitrary email address doesn't constitute a breach of privacy.
I said anti-consumer, not anti-privacy. Online only is also cancer, which is what requiring an account effectively is.
My comment wasn't against accounts (although I strongly suspect that I think that the kinds of things that should require accounts is much smaller than you do), it was against accounts that get arbitrarily cut off, or cut off because the account for accessing your media is tied to all kinds of other things that have nothing to do with accessing your media and for which you can be summarily disconnected with little to no recourse.
You don't need one. But it's extremely useful in most cases, necessary for many things (playing other players, game accounts) and absolutely nothing privacy-invading about it. Giving someone a random e-mail has nothing to with identity. You're giving someone a random set of characters, so that if you chose to re-engage with that entity, you have some way of doing that.
> Giving someone a random e-mail has nothing to with identity. You're giving someone a random set of characters, so that if you chose to re-engage with that entity, you have some way of doing that.
...until the entity wants forms of payment. Then you've got to keep that random sequence of characters for your life unless you're willing to part ways with your purchase.
No, your statement doesn't reflect the reality that companies do treat emails as identities.
I wonder one motivation (besides harvesting more user data) is that the Oculus devices are sold at a break-even point or even at a loss.
So Facebook is essentially subsidizing the cost of an Oculus headset initially and making up the profit on ads data. Similar to the console business of selling the hardware at or below cost and making it up in the games sales.
The trouble is, this is really just them being honest. Within 6 months of acquiring Oculus they started pulling in data from their Oculus accounts and associating that with Facebook profiles based on email or whatever identifiers they can use. Requiring Facebook accounts is just being transparent about the fact that Facebook maintains a profile for you which crosses all of their systems whether you have accounts or not.
I hope the EU addresses the root of the issue and starts cracking down on the shadow profile stuff.
Counter-point; that was a one-way street. Data was potentially fed from Oculus to Facebook. Now, what you do on Facebook can impact your Oculus use. Get banned on Facebook and lose access to your purchased software on Oculus effectively making your device useless.
That wasn’t the GPs point. The GP was saying that the real root of the problem isn’t Oculus’s mandatory FB login but rather that FB is allowed to harvest and link profiles across multiple devices to begin with.
He didn't say FB shouldn't be hit with an antitrust probe, in your analogy it would be actively tracking thieves down instead of waiting for the thief to voluntarily turn himself in
Excellent. I'm hoping they have to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp.
Hoping Google experiences the same fate. Need to decouple my phone from Google assistant and many other things... for instance, you can't subscribe to a podcast in their app unless you turn on Physical Location Tracking and Web History. Android Auto no longer reads back messages to you (it used to) unless you do the same thing.
Google is usually savvy about their data hoarding, but they really tip their hand in cases like this where they require unnecessary permissions for basic functionality to work.
The one that gets me is adding a label to a saved place in Maps. I can save the location fine and add it to whatever list I create for it, but if I want to add a simple custom label it blocks me because I don't have Web & App Activity tracking turned on.
Reminds me of my pet peeve in Google Maps: it used to have local search history, but when they moved it to the cloud, they removed _all_ search history unless you opted into the Web History. You know, Google, there's a middle ground.
Product tying was one of the reasons for the Microsoft anti-trust trial in the 90’s.
Iirc you can obtain a monopoly in one product legally by out-competing your competition, but you can’t obtain another monopoly in another product by tying the second product to the legal monopoly product.
MS built Internet Explorer into Windows to remove users’ need for a third-party browser like Netscape. And they did some contractual tying of Office to Windows too iirc.
I don't get why facebook would even forcibly tie oculus to facebook accounts. All they had to do was "encourage" oculus owners to use facebook via various dark patterns, network effect or incentives. I bet they could have gotten 90% of oculus owners to use facebook accounts without much effort. Was that other 10% so important that they were willing to risk regulatory action? Was it greed? Hubris? Though I guess you could argue that VR is still in its infancy and there is no reason for any antitrust action. But why risk it?
But a particular bad mark in Facebook's case was Palmer stating, as a representative of the company, that they would never require a Facebook account. Consumers might've bought the product based on that statement.
Who was lying isn't material. That Palmer clearly stated Facebook authorized him to make that commitment is all that matters. So it's very hard for Facebook to now go around and claim they didn't promise that. Palmer, at the time, acting on behalf of Facebook, made that promise.
And that probably puts this case in a much more solid legal territory than, for example, Nest.
Google is in a much better place here as any person can have multiple Google accounts. That’s something that is explicitly against the Facebook terms of service.
While there are concerning similarities, Google backed off from their “real names” policy years ago. Facebook continues to enforce such a policy despite its much-noted dangers and disparities [0], while also more aggressively (compared to Google) banning users for having multiple accounts, making posts Facebook doesn’t like, or not behaving like a “real user” according to their entirely opaque algorithms.
In my direct personal experience as an Oculus/Facebook/Google account-holder, Facebook’s polices have had a much larger negative impact on consumers. I’m glad they are the (first) target of this probe.
Things can't all happen simultaneously. The fact that it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it's not happening. The fact that it's similar doesn't mean it's similar enough to also warrant a similar probe. Situations are different, and it does no good to always have this whataboutism thrown into every discussion.
Is that why I can't control it from my Alexa anymore?! I didn't really pay attention, I just knew it stopped working and never really looked into fixing it.
They also removed integration with countless third party devices IF you migrated to Google account. They pushed new accounts before they even had any integration ready at all. More than a year later, majority of integrations are still not available.
these smart home devices are terrible. That alexa needs an internet connection to operate sucks. I'm already giving up tons of privacy and now when my internet inevitably goes down nothing in my house works, it becomes a stupid home.
It's a weird situation because from a competition point of view I don't think Facebook doing this makes either Facebook or Oculus particularly more dominant. It's actually a negative for the VR offering. At best one can say, would another social network have a chance to compete with Facebook on Oculus when the user is already linked via their Facebook account? Probably its harder but quantitatively very hard to prove.
In reality the competition concerns are secondary to what is really a consumer rights issue: people are buying a good that can be rendered functionality inoperable at any time in the future by completely unrelated actions pertaining to their Facebook account. This doesn't just apply to the headset but possibly hundreds of dollars of apps they have bought.
I don't know how this gets resolved at the moment when the only regulatory mechanism to enforce it is competition law where the concerns are minor (at least for now).
It seems like the pace of antitrust actions by U.S. federal government and U.S. states has suddenly ramped up quite a bit. And now we have this, albeit from the German government.
Like automakers in Germany, Airbus in France or Samsung in Korea, US tech sector has long been considered crown jewels and given special, lenient treatment by the regulators. However, unlike the others, instead of using this special treatment to reduce risks, FAANMG have decided to monetize it instead, by blatantly exacerbating already questionable anti-consumer practices. Their culture and governance impels them to one-up each other, until they cross the line.
If Facebook just required a login, I believe the regulators would let it slip, it's just a toy after all. But in their arrogance, they let their automated algorithms brick customers' $400 device. Although this alone would eventually bring the attention of authorities upon them, they decided to double down on their hubris by not providing any support to the affected customers. And if that wasn't enough, Facebook refuses to even acknowledge the problem and back down. At this point, they are clearly baiting the anti-trust agencies. Not unlike a mafioso blocking a disabled spot in front of the police station.
Conservative wackadoodles, ignoring that reality has a liberal bias, are targeting social media and big tech for this aforementioned bias.
Liberal socialists, ignoring that the founders of these big tech companies have created thousands of jobs and trillions of dollars in new wealth ripe for America to reap, are targeting them for the sin of being successful.
Big tech, being big and filled with a generation of activist workers, is also flexing its social and political muscles after standing mostly on the sideline for decades.
(I hope the sarcasm in this post was obvious)
In truth, Big Tech has done bad things (and good!), Liberals and Conservatives have valid gripes (and some not!), it's been decades since meaningful regulation has been enforced (even if some has) and in the wake of the 2016 election and ongoing chaos, tech is both making itself prominent in the political discussion and being made a target of that discussion.
In the US at least I believe Trump wanted to campaign on the issue and pressured the AG to investigate large tech companies. As I recall many of the investigations weren't complete enough to make the news until nearly election day (this was a point of contention between Trump and the AG2. There might be a few more of these in the works.
Trump doesn't like Facebook. Antitrust overall is a sensible vector of attack. Separating Instagram into a different company could fuck them up.
This lawsuit doesn't look like the most sensible mode of attack on the company itself though. Oculus is not strategic. They could sell it and it probably wouldn't bother them. Its not Instagram.
I expect the DOJ is conscious that while their current boss doesn't like Facebook, their incoming boss does.
So, this appears designed to look aggressive enough to appease Trump while he still has the power to dismiss but toothless enough to fizzle or cause minimal damage once he's gone.
I'm half expecting all the tech antitrust lawsuits to just be dropped quietly a month or two after Biden enters office. Either way the tech companies are not really under threat here. Facebook won't cry over losing oculus.
Oculus is incredibly strategic. There is a very high chance that much of the work world (certainly all knowledge creation jobs) will transition to VR within a decade. Seems improbable from here, but just walking the tech forwards in predictable ways and you see it. Lighter, better resolution, etc. Being the dominant platform when(ever) that happens is wildly strategic.
ALL online account requirements for hardware need to be investigated. Speakers, televisions, doorbells, watches, freaking weighing scales. If you purchase something, it should work as advertised without having to sign over your life via a lengthy ToS, and shouldn't become a brick when the company decides to shut down a random server.
I sure hope something happens, I wanted to buy an oculus this xmas for myself, but I left facebook in 2011, and all this facebook drama with the oculus accounts getting banned for no reason and having to have a Facebook account was the sole reason I did not. now I'm looking into who the next best vr option is.
I have a Go that I only use for videos (Skybox). Are these device OEM unlockable, or are there any 3rd party roms for these devices? It'd be great if the installed Android system could be replaced by something truly open.
Will somebody blow this stupid fucking company up already. Jesus. Their secret sauce is exploiting women via deliberately creating personality disorders
I have an Oculus 1 and can't add any friends unless I link a Facebook account, so I've just been enjoying playing Beat Saber and a few other games "off the grid".
The scary thing is eye tracking data which could be used to figure out effective decision strategies and could be used to place more compelling ads. When this information along with facebook( used for oculus login), instagram and data they get from google, I would be spammed with all kinds of things.
I am hoping for nice privacy based VR headset but looks like most companies grade eye tracking data.
While I agree that it's a bit scary, I don't understand when you say "I would be spammed with all kinds of things".
We are already spammed with all kinds of things. I mean that's no big deal at all. The real dystopian future we need to worry about is when my activity on Facebook affects things such as a shadow credit score and medical history being used by potential employers, police, extortionists, etc.
The cost of less nefarious data collection is... 1000 USD.
I'm glad there is competition in this space, but for average person 1000 USD is too much for a toy. I bought an oculus CV1 used on ebay a few years ago when there was a lull in demand. It's fun, but the second they demand a facebook login it permanently goes on the shelf. Rather unfortunate, but hey maybe one day VR toys will be accessible to non-elites without having to buy into a cyberpunk dystopia (ie if a more benevolent competitor releases cheaper hardware).
The sad thing is that the Quest has other benefits that, to me, make it worth more than the Index. This video covers some of the magic that's possible with the Quest [0]. Before the Quest was in people's hands I was constantly getting shot down when I was saying:
1. Inside-out tracking is the future.
2. Detaching from the desktop and playing on the go is a huge feature (tetherless).
3. Hand tracking will re-imagine HCI
Everyone I know, some of whom are very big Valve fans, would tell me that "fidelity is more important" and "outside-in is fundamentally better and will always be better". That's simply not true as evidenced by the new headset from Facebook.
Multiple studios have completely switched to developing for the Quest 2 as the standard.
Well that was worth it. I'd love to see the recording of the meeting where they came up with the plan. I'll bet someone said "hey that's evil, users won't like that". Would be nice to know a) who spoke next and b) what they said. Or we can guess...
I loved my Quest, even purchased prescription lens inserts for a better experience and after the Facebook account change I stopped using it entirely. Pretty sad to have it collect dust but this change was bad enough that I’d rather just give it up altogether.
I hope HP expands their reach in the VR space and provides more alternatives. They have a winner on their hands with the Reverb G2. I'd like to see them dip their toe into the standalone headset market.
How is this different from Apple/Google requiring iPhone/Android users to create iCloud/Google accounts to use most features on the phones? They should be subject to similar probes.
My thinking is that it's best to buy it now, while Facebook is still selling them at or below cost, then install whatever root, or hacked OS, or legally enforced update comes out in the future
I would say at this point in history if you tie yourself in any form to companies like Facebook, Google or Amazon and later you are screwed over, you should consider a career on masochism.
I think Facebook and Amazon are far easier to avoid. With Google their tentacles are spread so far across that its impossible to avoid them completely. It is disheartening to see talented engineers excited about working for advertising companies like Google or Facebook. Maybe nerd ethics have shifted over time, I don't know. I've migrated from gmail to a personal domain + host, and to FF for browsing, but that's about it. Out of principle I don't use an ad-blocker, I simply avoid going to sites that feature obnoxious Ads/UX.
I’m tied to all 3, it’s fine. The people wringing their hands and obsessing over it seem more masochistic to me.
I have all my email in docs in google, I have something like 7 echo’s scattered around the house, I have a Facebook Portal and a Quest 2. All of these things make my life easier or bring joy into it. Avoiding these things would make my life measurably worse. I am disappointed that Apple, as the most privacy conscious of the group, sadly hasn’t built any real competitors to any of these devices.
Aside from your response being rather unkind, I don't think we can dismiss the meat of his point so easily.
I avoid most of these things to the extent I am reasonably able. I use a minority email provider, mapping provider, cloud storage provider, backup provider, webdav, caldav, browser (on desktop and mobile), search engine, ebook reader, lock down my android phone in various ways to diminish google's control of it (my work uses Google so to be employed by my current employer I must use google), don't have a facebook account or a twitter account, try to use windows with most of the reporting back turned off and accounts signed out, don't use voice assistants at all, etc.
I think it's the right thing to do, and generally I think it's a good idea to use non dominant service providers as a way to encourage competition.
All this, and I'm sure all the big companies have huge amounts of data about me from when I mess up or from how my life impinges on other people who are more thoroughly tracked.
This definitely makes my life significantly more complex, and various things that are trivial for others are a bit of a palaver for me and for many people I know it'd be completely unreasonable. It's a trade off I've decided to make, but the comment you are referring to highlights the convenience, and I don't think it's wrong.
I have a child and the Alexa is clutch. If she wakes up early we can play her sleepy-time music from anywhere in the house. When it’s time for bed I can dim her bedroom lights with my voice. We use the portal tv to video chat with our family on the other side of the country. The Quest 2 is simple I can drop in and play anywhere in my house for 15 minutes without worrying about steam/windows/whatever updates.
Facebook used Oculus as a test to see what they could get away with. They are eyeing more profitable platforms like Instagram, and probably other things such as integrated cell phones.
Sucks for Oculus, they had a good thing going before Zuck raped them.
With Quest 1, which had a separate account system, I would frequently show off the headset by letting people try it on. With Quest 2, anyone who tries it on would have full access to my Facebook account and Messenger history, so I can't do that. And no, they don't give you any sort of warning about this, you have to figure it out yourself.
(I reported this to their bug bounty program on October 26. The submission was rejected as a duplicate. I rechecked today and it was still not fixed.)