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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

If you make a Facebook account and never touch the Facebook aspect of it, is there any material difference between that and an Oculus account?

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A better question: why does a VR headset require an account at all? Should my monitor require an account? Should my keyboard?

It's a peripheral, not a platform.

You want it to be a peripheral, Facebook wants it to be a platform.

Maybe FB wants to collect data from sensors, and other type of usage?

They can do that without an FB account, Instagram and WhatsApp certainly funnel data into a shared storage that FaceBook can read too without me specifically connecting the accounts.

Not sure if you know what device you're talking about. The Oculus Quest is very much a platform, not a "peripheral". There's no device that the Quest connects to to be used as a peripheral. It's a completely stand alone computing device that serves as a platform for third party software, the same as your phone which requires an account.

I know the blog post refers to "Oculus devices" and does not in any way imply that the account is required only for the Quest. I agree that the Quest is not the same as their other headsets. I disagree that any of these should require an account.

Nothing in the announcement limits this to the Quest. It says Oculus "devices" including peripherals. What is the justification for requiring an account to use a peripheral that you plug into your computer?

Even if it were just the Quest: How is it reasonable to require an account to use a "stand alone computing device"? I have many stand alone computing devices in my home without the need for an account with their manufacturers.

I was already skeptical of my Oculus Rift when after buying it I learned I needed to create an account just to download drivers (WTF!) No other device on my computer requires an account to obtain drivers. I would love to hear the justification.

I'm not sure I follow this line of thought. Without an account, what would all the game purchases you make be associated with? What about friends lists? Support requests? The Oculus, and the vision for the product, is more akin to consoles than it is your run-of-the-mill PC.

I disagree.

Take oculus Rift as an example. You own a game (on a different platform) which supports VR (including your device). You plug your Rift in, calibrate the sensors/room and start playing the game. You shouldn't even need internet connection.

For support requests, use the serial number, like everywhere else.

Consoles work offline just fine.

>I would love to hear the justification.

"We require you create an account so that we can protect your personal data."

Not the OP, but I was wondering the same thing. I also don't know which devices I'm talking about.

The thing is: to sell me stuff, you don't need to know my name. You don't need to keep tabs on me. You may offer it, but I may decline. Plenty of mortar-and-bricks-stores work this way: there are loyalty cards for tracking, but customers who forego them do not have to register to make a purchase.

Point in fact: there are also internet shops that allow such options. Sure, they need a bit of data to send the parcel and the confirmation/invoice/etc. But that doesn't require everyone to create a username/password combination - and some internet shops blissfully do not require that. They get paid and ship the purchase to the address specified, and that's it.

In this case, it seems purchases could be tied to the Oculus device specified during the purchase. While I can certainly imagine benefits to tying purchases to a user account (e.g., ability to use on multiple Oculus devices), I don't see a reason to require logging in. Am I overlooking something?

> In this case, it seems purchases could be tied to the Oculus device specified during the purchase. While I can certainly imagine benefits to tying purchases to a user account (e.g., ability to use on multiple Oculus devices), I don't see a reason to require logging in. Am I overlooking something?

If (when) the device fails, you would lose all of its associated software licenses and have to buy them again

Unfortunately things have been moving this way, even for peripherals such as mice:

https://insider.razer.com/index.php?threads/i-need-an-accoun...

The amount of people defending Razer is incredible. They fully buy the idea that internet connection and accounts are necessary to use a mouse, or simple features like changing the dpi.

I would call Oculus Rift as "just VR headset" but Oculus Quest would be reasonable to call as "standalone VR computer", not peripheral. Is requiring account for a "computer" reasonable is another question.

Well, both Linux and Windows let you have offline accounts (though the latter heavily discourages it, and I can’t speak for macOS), so there’s precedent in the desktop world for that functionality. Of course, why would Facebook bother to support it?

Considering how TVs can come with bloat, accounts and build advertising these days I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up needing an account for your monitor.

I mean, my Nvidia card has had one for years because I didn’t realise I could’ve installed the drivers without creating one. What did a graphics card ever need with that? My mouse required one.

It used to work to start the Nvidia installer, let it unpack (other unpacking tools could most likely extract the archive as well) its contents, exit it and instead let Windows search the unpacked files for the correct driver by using the Windows driver selection dialog.

I'm not sure if this still works or if there are other things beside the driver that one would like to have installed nowadays.

I'm sure this just changes which pipe usage data goes down, but this means Facebook directly gets to use your VR usage/purchases to market to you, and they will follow you around the web, because they know. I think that's the main reason folks generally dislike FB connect in the first place, but I don't want to speak for everyone :)

> this means Facebook directly gets to use your VR usage/purchases to market to you, and they will follow you around the web

Only if you use or log into your bogus FB account.

Having your IP address is identifiable enough (combined with all the other joys of big data) to Facebook and its marketing wing, so don't feel too confident, but if you don't care, then that's kind of the point.

Wondering if creating burning accounts for everything would prevent any tracking. Basically

- create burner gmail

- create burner oculus name/account

- create burner Facebook account

- always use a VPN

It seems like you could completely remain anonymous and provide Facebook with data they could never correlate to a real person.

Did you try to make a burner Facebook account? I tried doing this since my client needed something to be verified through FB and I don't have an account.

After initial login I was asked to verify myself by either providing ID (sic!) or a phone number.

Well, seems that after 2023 I'll just trash my Quest.

Whoa really? I deleted my Facebook in 2014, so I had no idea they actually did ID verification. If this is the case I guess you could spin up a burner number on Twilio, but this seems like a lot of work to go through. I have a Quest and will likely try these steps, but no way will I ever give Facebook my real identity.

Yep, I’ve had exactly the same thing happen to me. You might be able to delay it slightly if you use an email address they have in their records from other users (i.e. an email address some of your friends have stored for you in their contacts they’ve shared with Facebook). Set up a new gmail / Hotmail account they have no trace of existing before, the red flags go up and it will almost certainly get you to verify with some form of government ID, real phone number or possibly both.

I’ve supported Oculus since DK1 through every single iteration of hardware. This change by Facebook has just killed the brand entirely for me. I simply won’t sign up / back into Facebook (killed my account around 2011 as I found it overwhelmingly toxic and have never looked back) to use a piece of hardware I already purchased.

I had reason to try to create an FB burner account not so long ago, but I couldn't get through into any worthwhile practical use without providing photo ID, despite giving them actual pristine phone numbers on every try. My guess is they force it upon every identity where they don't already have linkability from phone books they've snooped through, and the like.

What do VPN help if you have Facebook firmware on your computer? You also need to never play with friends with the Rift online, or let them borrow your Wifi, etc. If you have Facebook apps or hardware you leak fingerprinting bits. The Rift has bluetooth for the controllers right? Better put it in a Farradays cage because your neighbors will rat on you to Zuckerberg.

There is no having a tiny bit of Facebook. If you give them a finger ...

I mean at this point... seeing ads on VR instead of toothpaste might be a win

If you're logged into the account on your computer, sure. Just make sure you either make all purchase on-device, or log into Oculus in a private window.

Facebook tracks you even when you're logged out btw.

You'll need a separate ip address for each device then correct?

Not sure, does facebook just assume that everyone connecting from behind a NAT is the same person?

That seems like it could go poorly, like if one person in a household had been buying a secret birthday present or an engagement ring or researching divorce lawyers and then the targeted ads were associated to everyone in the house.

The definitely assume it's the same person. I get advertising clearly targeted at other people on my internet connection (eg. ads for property in a certain suburb, when I don't even actively look at property while another family member does).

There's much more than IP adress that's used to track you. Companies like facebook use all the forms of browser storage, browser fingerprinting, etc.

How is that different from an Oculus account, though? FB could keep the accounts separate but still funnel data in from Oculus to FB (as I'm sure they'd already been doing). If you create a throwaway FB account just for your Oculus device, the only material difference is which DB the entry is in.

when you sign up to facebook i bet their ToS is much different than Oculus'

That's my point around changing the pipes. I think it's still meaningfully different though, because there are probably some first party benefits of going directly through FB, but that's speculation.

Forcing users to violate their personal moral principles, upon which the decision of never using anything related to Facebook rests, is a big enough difference for many--myself included.

EDIT: I didn't know that Facebook bought Oculus some time ago, back in 2014--for some reason I thought it happened far more recently. I would make the case above for someone who had bought an Oculus device before Facebook's acquisition and now would be forced to use its platform, then. I don't have anything to do with Facebook, personally. I don't even use WhatsApp, so there's that for my moral integrity.

Then you already have a problem with using an Oculus device regardless of what sort of account you can sign in with, they've owned Oculus since 2014

That's right, I didn't know. Well, rephrase that to a less radical standpoint, then: "upon which the decision of not wanting to use Facebook rests".

In any case, I personally have never owned an Oculus or anything related to Facebook.

At the point that you've given money to facebook when you bought their product, haven't you already done that?

>haven't you already done that?

Fortunately, I haven't.

So what if they'd buy Vive next?

You burn your Vive device to the ground and implore the Gods to rid humanity from the Zucc.

I'm not sure if you mean "an oculus account owned by Facebook anyway" - but in general terms I'd be somewhat surprised if a "real" game/software/service company (eg: Nintendo, gog.com) kept quasi-/il-legal shadow profiles that they actively tried to pair with your account.

On Facebook you're required to use your real name. I don't know if the same is true of an Oculus account, but that's a major difference if not. Of course you can create a Facebook account with a fake name, but then you risk getting banned.

I have a quest and just used a handle in the Oculus account creation. There was no demand for a real name at all. So yes, it's a big change.

Can you do so without accepting their terms of service? They use every data source they can to build profiles for people so accepting the ToS is going to approve use of your information for as much as they can get away with.

I do not like the idea that I need a social media account to use a VR headset, regardless of the realities of using the oculus account data still ending up with facebook.

because every action you perform within the account that signs into the FB account becomes a parcel of information you're giving to FB.

If you sign in to one of their accounts, you are functionally signing into the facebook website.

What if you are not allowed to make a FB account due to their TOS? Not everyone can be on FB.

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