Facebook account banned after linking Oculus account
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I honestly don't know, but if I had to guess it would be no.
"No need for chargebacks, I purchased it from John Lewis in the UK so they wont have any issues refunding me. All my previous Oculus purchases on their store are now unplayable on my CV1 though so I might have to pursue a small claims court claim to get any money back on those."
It turns out I can't use the advertised features of the Apple devices I bought because Side Car requires 2FA with a phone number and my phone service is data only.
Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
> Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all. They're just intentionally crippling their expensive devices.
I believe they just want to make you get used to that so one day you would't even think about using any of your devices/apps without iCloud. Their vision probably is to make all the devices merely interfaces to iCloud and to make "offline usage" sound as ridiculous as using a toaster without electricity.
Apple Wireless Direct Link - https://owlink.org/wiki/
Note that once you have at least one phone number added, you can switch it to be device-based instead, where it will send 2FA codes directly to any Apple device you're logged into (there's a little system popup) and the phone number becomes strictly a backup for if all devices are unavailable. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204915
> Given that I connect the iPad to the Mac via a USB-C cable, it's not clear why iCloud is required at all.
Sidecar is primarily designed for wireless usage, and there's something behind-the-scenes where it's using the iCloud account to sync identity info so that that user doesn't have to manually set up any cross-device authentication stuff.
Now that it does appear, I get a pop-up when clicking on the iPad income, saying I can't use it because the account doesn't have 2FA set up. Nowhere in the advertising for the device was there a disclaimer that a legacy phone number was required to use the features.
I was thinking of maybe upgrading to the new Oculus' but after announcing it will require a Facebook account I started to rethink that. This submission really hit the nail in the coffin and will absolutely not get another Oculus now.
> All the extra angles of FOV are very distorted, and there is a red static constantly fuzzing away in the display.
> Plus, you have to deal with the Pimax company, which has to be one of the most incompetent companies I've ever met when it comes to taking money and delivering product without stepping into the realm of actual fraud. When I bought mine, it was 3 false "it's shipped" announcements, 2 months, and a threat to reverse my credit card charge before I finally received it.
Apple’s investment in Privacy is going to pay off so big.
I wonder if Facebook can spin off a company that includes Oculus and competes with Apple on Privacy.
I’d guess no.
The only thing I really did to improve it was to 3d print a stand for the hand controllers. More an aesthetic choice than anything.
Pros
- Knuckles controllers, still nothing like them
- External base station tracking, the only option that opens up full body tracking and makes it easy to do feet based movement
- High Refresh rate
- Good FOV
Cons
- Knuckles still isn't universally supported
- LCD screen and no OLED
- Reverb G2 has a much better screen
- Wires
I would recommend the G2 but its tracking and controllers just aren't as good as the Index, unless you're just going to use it for driving and flying games.
The valve index is a very nice upgrade over the original htc vive and the original oculus. The 'screen door' effect is all but gone the new controllers are very comfortable and the tracking is stellar. The index is heavier than the original oculus but the way the weight is distributed and the way the strapping works makes it a non issue. My only complaint is also a problem in the 'gen 1' headsets. Reflection off the fresnel lenses can cause some banded 'flare', especially noticeable when most of the screen is very dark but there is some portion of very bright light.
Sadly I have no experience with the 'upstart' headsets from Microsoft, HP, etc.
They're not even comparable. The Quest is a headset and two controllers you put it on and pick the controllers up, draw a room boundary and you're in. Works in any room in your house, completely stand alone.
Index requires you to install multiple sensors in a specific room in your house, and requires a connection to a desktop PC tower and fiddling around with Steam to play.
I think the FB account requirement is incredibly dumb from Oculus (Don't understand why it couldn't just be a shadow account like Insta/Whatsapp which everyone seems fine with weirdly) but really the product their offering is entirely in a class of it's own for a fraction of the price a normal VR setup costs and a fraction of the hassle.
I think if the market was different and what they were offering wasn't unique I think far fewer people would care and we'd all just buy different headsets.
I honestly have no idea though. I don't get why they're in this space as it doesn't appear from the outside that they're trying very hard.
If you don't think they're trying very hard though, I'm not sure if you've been following VR particularly much.
Also a PC only game is niche enough, no PCVR game will ever make VR mainstream. Really, the mainstream VR game is Beat Saber - that alone has probably sold more VR headsets than any other app or game combined.
The only way to make VR mainstream imo is to offer it at console prices or less and make it standalone, which is exactly what the Quest is doing. It's really unfortunate it requires an FB account. I guess they justify it because Xbox and PS5 both require online accounts too.
Ironically, Facebook also acquired Beat Games (who makes Beat Saber) last year and effectively ruined it by intentionally breaking all the mods and custom songs, leaving it a shell of its former glory.
According to steamcharts [1], player counts peaked around July 2019 and have only dwindled since the acquisition (with the exception of two small bumps when the acquisition happened in November). Average player counts are have been cut in half since then, in less than a year.
I have almost 200 hours in Beat Saber, but I haven't played it for almost a year now, now that it's just the same two-dozen songs over and over.
(Are custom songs really broken? Haven't tried in a month or so)
I paid attention to the dev discord servers for a few months after the acquisition when they were churning through new mods when the old ones broke and people gave up on trying to maintain them, but haven't checked it recently. I would expect there's probably working mods still, but it's also probably a lot harder to keep them working over time.
FB's official stance on modding is that they will support mods that don't engage in "piracy or illicit modding, including mods that infringe on third-party IP rights". [1]
[1] https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcoming-beat-games-to-facebook...
Joking aside. What headset have you got that takes more than a few minutes to connect?
Then have to dive behind the computer to connect a HDMI and 3 USB cables (not enough ports on front).
For headsets, there are several properties that segment the market:
1. Tracking: outside cameras/emitters vs inside-out tracking
2. Tethered vs wireless (including PC powered, but using wireless transmission)
3. PC powered vs standalone device
For each of these, there are multiple vendors to choose from, except for standalone devices. In this case, the Oculus Quest is unique. There's no other competition.
Moreover, the Quest is the only device that can be run without a corresponding high end PC. If you don't have a PC like that, then the cost is prohibitive. There's also the space factor. VR needs space, which is already an issue. With the PC powered headsets, you also need that PC to be close enough to your open VR space. Otherwise, you need to rearrange your living space or invest in a VR dedicated PC.
In summary, the Vive Index is fantastic and arguably the best headset in the market right now, but the Oculus Quest fills a different niche of that market.
(And as to the topic of the article: I'm done with Oculus based on Facebook's policies).
Until recently, the Oculus Rift S would be a great pick for that.
I don't yet have an HP Reverb G2, but I expect good things out of that headset. The HTC Cosmos would also be a good choice.
The Valve Index (yes, I mistyped before) is an awesome headset, but the lighthouse emitter based tracking system isn't great for seated. Not only is it a hassle to setup, but it's easier for your chair or monitor or whatever to block the laser grid from the lighthouse units. And if you're seated, you aren't taking advantage of the highly accurate room-scale tracking the lighthouses provide. I'd stick with the convenience of an inside-out headset if you're primarily doing seated VR.
For example, I tended to prefer my Rift S for sim games (sim racing, sim flight) for all the reasons listed above.
The only VR headsets I've seen so far in stores around here (a major metropolitan city) are headsets with only the lenses, in which you slot your own smartphone as the screen and CPU. Wouldn't these also count as standalone devices in your classification?
[I've had the Google cardboard, DayDream and the Samsung Gear headsets.]
Its like comparing a pre-model-T car with a car from 1950. You might argue that for some purposes both are equivalent but that doesn't capture the qualitative improvement that has happened almost everywhere. Everything is improved and some areas feel perfected in comparison.
Do you mean the Valve Index or the HTC Vive?
But it's also $999, requires a beefy gaming PC, and the setup is slightly more involved. But if you already have a beefy gaming PC (I'm a PC gamer, so I already did), don't mind spending 10 minutes attaching the lighthouses to the corners of your room, and of course have the $999 to buy the full kit, it's worth it.
I'm not a fan of the Index. First problem, it has horrible black levels. Everything looks like you're in a layer of fog compared to the Rift. Maybe if you've never used a Rift before you won't notice but it was shockingly bad for me.
The headphones are utter crap. I don't get whoever thought headphones that hover 1/2 inch away from your ears would work. Take whatever headphones you have now that you're listening to music on and pull them 1/2 inch away for each ear. The sound goes down, it sounds tinny, less full, bases are missing, etc. The Index sounded exactly like that. Some friends said you have to get them perfectly lined up but if that's true the moment you move your head suddenly in some game they're no longer going to be aligned.
This also means the sound leaks into the room far more than it would with on ear headphones. It's not going to be loud but it is going to be annoying for anyone within a room if they aren't making some louder noise.
Next up, Steam VR is just not as good as Oculus Connect (or whatever Oculus's home screen system is called). In part because Oculus has built in "pull up your desktop and/or multiple windows" at anytime in anytime game and pin them to say up. Apparently there's a 3rd party app that will provide this for Index/Vive but I use that feature all the time. Inside a game want to look up a walkthru just pin in there in my view.
Now for some things that no one will admit to but I will...
The Index Controllers didn't feel as good to me as Rift Controllers. I get they have fanciers sensors. I get they grip your hands. But, probably the #1 use for VR is porn. Controllers that require 2 hands to put on are not good for things that require one had to be free.
I have lots of friends in the industry, I see none of them using an Index and plenty of complaints.
As for Quest/Quest 2, even if there wasn't the FB issue it's like choosing an iPhone instead of a PS5. iPhone has tons of great games but it doesn't have PS5 level games. Similarly Quest has tons of great games, but it doesn't have PC level VR games and it will never have any porn games being locked up by Facebook. (and even if it did, do you really want FB knowing which porn games you're playing?)
I'm praying the HP Reverb G2 gets good reviews and solves most of those issues. It's apparently a month or 2 from shipping so I'm crossing my fingers I can get rid of this Rift.
Downsides to consider:
• You need a solid gaming PC (with a 2070 or better).
• Expensive ($1000 for the kit)
• Connected to the computer by a wire, awkward for "room-scale" VR
• Base stations provide great tracking but require setup (mounting high up in your room) and mean that the setup isn't very portable.
• Limited/janky access to exclusive titles. (You can hack around to get Oculus-only titles to work, but it seems rough and I haven't tried it myself.)
If you're not budget-constrained, I believe the Index will give you the best overall experience.
As a counterpoint, I am using Index together with 1070 Ti and the performance is flawless.
The Index is higher resolution/refresh rate and will require more hardware, but if you just want to get into some VR and dick around, the Vive is more than enough to get started, can be found for <$200 used, and a ton of the popular games (e.g., Beat Saber, SuperHot VR, etc) just really aren't that graphically demanding.
The Vive is also compatible with the knuckles controllers and those can be purchased separately, so you're not totally locked out from some of the more game changing stuff either.
This. Unless you have built up sufficiently high profile Facebook fame known inside and out of it, beyond just having a moderately active account, I wouldn’t consider it safe to spend a penny on this.
Really unfortunate that virtually no competitor exists in mobile VR segment.
I agree with the high total cost though. Most people pushing PC VR, will forget about how much a real VR ready PC will cost. It's easy to spend close to $3000 even when people loathed to admit it.
I used to think everyone should learn a programming language just so they can experience its expressive power but more and more I wish they would so they wouldn't get duped by really dumb marketing.
However, capitalism doesn't leave consumers with no options - vote with your wallet!
I did not write what I wrote as a parody. Shareholder primacy is the foremost blight on this modern existence and is responsible for an innumerably large portion of the negative externalities that cause so such much suffering today.
I would vote with my wallet, but that will accomplish exactly jack shit. There are few who will stand with me if it means threatening their pathetically precious creature comforts which our modern capitalism so dutifully provides.
Also, it is worth noting that the entire goal of capitalism is to eliminate those options, using "free-market economics" as cover for its seemingly insatiable lust for competitors to gobble up or otherwise drive out of business. Some of the very first things they teach you in b-school, about moat building and competitive advantages and all that other crap, is an outright attack on the marketplace model
That really works with monopolies! /sarcasm /are-you-serious
Yes, this would cause price increase. But a lot of people would gladly pay for it. The ones who don't want to, could accept a "discount" in exchange for becoming a glass citizens.
Actually, it wouldn't. Facebook makes obscene profits. Rather than be uncompetitive, they'd keep the same price.
If we gave Facebook the choice of stopping stealing from people like this, or getting shut down, they'd do this in a second.
In a sane society, Facebook would have been shut down years ago, after the 2016 election.
I wonder what the world would look like with a independent, trustworthy, non-advertising-based company/organization which provided a similar anti-spam service for free, with the option to publicly tie to verified identities as well. (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)
Did we not see the same studies?
As I recall Google+/YouTube's real name policy came under fire because a large minority of people received substantially more hate speech.
https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati... - With this, a site or users of the site can choose many trusted moderators from the network and as the system grows it gets better over time.
I did receive a notice that in 2023 the Oculus Account would be deprecated however.
The Quest 2 is amazing and an important leap for VR. If you care about the state of VR, it must sell well.
Frankly, this is not the hill to die on. If you plan to own a smartphone or really use any kind of service or internet browsing in the modern world going forward you’re going to be faced with these kind of privacy dilemmas. Better to just accept it and move on with your life than to basically live like a Luddite for the rest of your life. Facebook will not be the first or last corporation to ask you to relax your absolute anonymity.
If only there were other companies with competing products which would assuage one’s concerns regarding privacy and/or anonymity and guard against Luddite lifestyles.
“Must sell well...hill to die on” feel a bit extreme, particularly given everything that has transpired in 2020.
Isn't the opposite true? If I care about the state of VR as a product free of social media lock-in, I want Oculus to fail hard.
This is absolutely the hill to die on. Oculus has competitors. The answer to save VR isn't to buy Oculus, it's to buy other headsets and hope Oculus dies unless they reverse their decision to require a Facebook account.
I wish that was true. If that was the case, I would've bought a headset from a competitor in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, while there are many competitive VR headsets out there, I cannot recall a single other VR headset that works standalone without a PC.
Not even mentioning the price point of Quest and the fact that it can be used for both PCVR and standalone, thus bringing a superset of features of other headsets. No need to set up lightboxes and being able to just buy the headset and play without anything extra is a value proposition that I don't see any other VR headset can provide.
Hopefully, the success of Quest will provide a kick in the ass to other manufacturers to make their own versions. Imo, the standalone+PCVR combo with no lightboxes is the future, with lightbox PCVR-only headsets being reserved for highly niche uses.
Well, at least you know yourself, but I don't appreciate this attempt to normalize your moral bankruptcy and ridicule others who haven't sold and don't want to sell their soul.
Maybe one day you'll be forced to confront the consequences of this lack of ethics. Until then, kindly fuck right off.
I will put my money somewhere else.
The content on the Quest may not be "desktop fidelity", but my time with the Quest 1 was VERY much enjoyable (especially compared to the Oculus Go), and often preferred over my desktop VR HMD simply for the convenience. And the content was quite good.
By this same metric, the Switch is also plagued with "mobile titles" given it's Android base and Tegra X1 mobile GPU. But most folks DON'T think of it like that, and for good reason: the Switch can keep up just fine in it's own market.
And if the Quest 2 has improved specs in every area over the Quest 1, then it's completely FINE for what it is.
It's just the company behind it fucked up a good thing.
The laws in the US governing privacy and data use have never been updated for the computer age, because the people who have been in power for the whole computer age generally don't understand computers.
Honestly though, the real answer is who knows - it's entirely proprietary information and all we can do on the outside is observe the fact that is does seem to be a pretty flawed detection system and guess at why that is. Does facebook use sentiment analysis of posts or post frequency to ban users they think are fake? Do they look for similar content of posts from different users to try and detect troll farms? I don't know and FB really doesn't want to talk about it.
Yeah, I think part of the problem is that Facebook has never had an actual product which people pay for and expect to work. Their whole culture and set of priorities are counter to this.
God help us all .
Same but with our Jenkins builds, which appear to be entirely non-deterministic. "Perhaps the praying will help," I think to myself as I create my PR.
I mean. It still is.
This is a reason why better education for all is the way forward for humanity.
People got so upset about the Catholic church selling the right to bend the divine rules that one guy wrote an extremely angry listicle, made a viral post on a church door, and the rest is history. And centuries of sectarian warfare.
(Seriously, most of the 95 theses are about indulgences: https://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html )
Of course there is a discussion to have about incentivizing the _wrong_ behavior (the need to create publicity around issues that shouldn't exist in the first place / only people with "clout" become the ones who get their issues resolved).
[At a party] A: What do you do? B: I work for $BIGTECH. A: You suck dude. I bought one of their products and it never worked once.
People on HN are not really strangers, we are part of a community. By helping one of us, they help one of their in groups. Not helping might devalue their investment in this place.
HN users are the early adopters that small group of users who have much more influence early on in projects. Care of early adopters makes sense.
Bigger companies seem not to care that much, apart from maybe twitter? And those few thousand upvote posts on reddit.
They wouldn't allow just any employee to "fix" these issues. Too often there is a lot of context that is omitted from the shared story, so it's not just a matter of hitting a button to remove a block.
Also, "I helped a member of the public defeat my organisation's policy" is a negative on the resume not a positive. Sadly.
When the coin in the coffer rings / An account from bannination springs!
What about the 99.9% of the rest who don't have those contacts?
I cannot afford to ignore 0.01% of incoming requests because we charge per request. At a certain point, yes, money and pros and cons yadda yadda yadda. It just feels that, once again, people are saying, "but Google does it!" -- and that does not mean you should.
I'd say the biggest problem it the non-existent support. It's fine if 0.01% fails, as long as there is human troubleshooting or help available if necessary.
If 100% of users are experiencing 0.01% random errors it probably isn't worth bothering about.
If 0.01% of users are experiencing 100% errors than it is much more important.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi20/presentation/hauer
Oh, please, you are confused. I worked at Google, most teams just don’t have metrics like this.
While I don’t think it’s acceptable, reality is that it’s expensive to compute such metric, i.e. you need to slice you monitoring stream per each user, has privacy implications, and often it’s unclear what action should be taken.
Now, instead of buying the Quest 2 (which is unquestionably the best-value headset available today) I'm waiting for a competitor to enter the space.
Imagine if your desktop monitor would only turn on when synced to an active account on a social media platform. If you decide to leave that platform, or if that platform decides you aren't providing enough invasive information about yourself and decides to leave you, you've got an expensive paperweight. No warning or recourse. No thank you.
We are rapidly heading towards this future and SV devs are decrying it on HN while helping implement it in the background to pad their wallets.
Yes there are people who think they need a big house in the bay area or need a Tesla, but that doesn't mean they have no other options but to work at Twitter or Facebook.
I was talking less about people who are Facebook employees and more about people who are Accenture / Cognizant / Infosys / etc employees or contractors, who get subcontracted to do work at Facebook or wherever else. They just have to convince a fresh college grad or visa applicant to sign say a 2-year contract, and that person may not realize quite what they're signing until they're put on a project
Edit: I wasn't trying to disagree with you if it sounded like I was. I meant this as "in addition to what you said" not "instead of what you said"
However, I don't believe it's a user-friendly product decision to tightly couple FB's VR hardware to its social media platform. It's yet another push towards a walled garden, much like Google's AMP and Apple's app store.
Eh...I'd hand that title to Valve.
I believe $300 inside-out tracking wireless headsets are much more likely to push VR out of the "trough of disillusionment" and into the mainstream.
Welcome to your new Samsung SmartTV.
As well as the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" bullshit. For every ban they should be required to issue a very specific clarification on why exactly were you banned and let you to speak to a real person.
Oh, your driver's license is only available as an app for a device you just got permabanned from. I guess you're not a citizen anymore.
My health care provider is now asking users to move away from physical credentials to use an app. I am livid.
Yes, the current Oculus / Facebook situation sucks.
However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.
Sure the Dash buttons are discontinued, but there's definitely an interesting area of products that might be developed in the coming years for other products in this wide domain.
OK, rephrase it slightly and say that it must not require an online account from a specific provider. If I can come up with an API endpoint that I want to use instead of Amazon, and I want to reconfigure my Dash button to use it, I should be legally and technically allowed to do so.
The regulation doesn't need to ban any categories of products, or mandate any features. It just needs to say that if your product depends on online connectivity for a significant part of its functionality, then it must not employ technical measures to prevent interoperability. Hardware that's sold to consumers already needs to meet various compliance standards, such as RF emissions testing; this doesn't seem like a heavy burden in comparison.
Of course, such a policy is very unlikely to be enacted in the US any time soon, but hey, I can dream.
Some people seem to believe Internet is the new electricity. Even if this is so, electricity doesn't have colour - only voltage, amperage and frequency. My toaster doesn't restrict me to use only electricity from a specific power plant. I can power it up even from a car battery, if I tinker with it a little. Similarly, a device like the Dash button should use whatever endpoint that implements the required API, and not be restricted to a specific provider.
Wouldn't impact its intended use case at all. Other than the fact that it could now be used for something useful I guess...
Those weren't innovations, those were solutions in search of a problem. Probably contributed to their discontinuation. Also, what "innovation" of the past 20 years has been truly innovative, life-changing, and a net positive for humanity? Pretty much everything that has come out of Silicon Valley has been at best neutral for society (creating new markets and revenue for businesses aren't a positive in my eyes).
We need to stop pulling the "stifling innovation" card. Not stifling innovation has led us to society's cancerous relationship with technology.
But if you can ban me from using a piece of hardware that I bought then you should be required to refund me and pay shipping for the return.
GDPR requires that algorithmic decisions get this kind of oversight. GDPR is the way to get redress here.
Make a law that requires them to give you a full refund for all hardware that you can’t use and all software purchased over the lifetime of the account.
That will make them incur a cost that makes it worthwhile for them to be more careful.
Edit: Downstream commenters make a good point. You'd have to put in a formula for "depreciation" of the refund, so you can't just get a refund years later.
Ensuring it can be used without an online account is actually reasonable.
If this was the law, then companies would change the way their products work or the way they ban people. Instead of banning, on Facebook, they would prevent the user from posting and interacting with other users. You would in essence get a very nice advert-only feed but not banned.
I don't see how that doesn't indicate that outlawing a requirement for an account is so much more preferable.
Yes. They should be able to ban you from their online platform if you misuse it and don't behave yourself but they shouldn't have a right to brick the device you've bought, no matter what you do.
Since we are talking about online games, the topic of how to deal with people caught cheating (as in using third party cheating tools) comes to mind. It is typical to ban those people. If a ban was synonymous with a refund, there is little incentive to not cheat.
If the law allowed for exceptions like this (e.g. banned with cause), then it'd be pretty hollow as the company is also the final arbiter of what cause is.
It is possible I am missing something though as this is not something I have put a lot of thought into.
For the cheating exception, I don't think it would be a problem. Most of those games have subscriptions, so there wouldn't be a lot to refund.
I like jedberg's depreciation idea, too. Maybe a combination of these answers all scenarios.
The bigger problem is that no individual would have any realistic hope of successfully suing facebook to prove unjust account termination.
[0] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buyin...
Sellers should not be able to take away goods after the sell; that's pretty much universally understood as theft.
That way for things that may well suit having linked account - fine, but not curtailing that avenue. Basicly making having it linked to an on line account - optional via consumer choice, as it should always be.
You have just outlawed Roku. An online account is required to make it work, because that's how it was designed to work. It's a rather useless device without the online account.
I would choose to disagree on this concept; from a business perspective, the hardware engineering design going into making the device has a targeted purpose from the outset, and is (cost) subsidized by that company specifically for their service (meaning, they could take a loss on the hardware and make up for it on the Service). Roku and RSA are extracting money for their service, not for their hardware - just like the Amazon Prime TV stick, or imagine if you will a Netflix stick made and sold by Netflix directly. The value to these companies is your service fee month over month, not the hardware they're providing - the hardware is just a delivery vehicle.
That does not mean the devices cannot technically do something other than what their primary intended purpose is; the alternative "TV in a box" projects can run on things like an Amazon Stick with a bit of work (I did it myself to mine, was neat to play with) just that it's not their primary purpose from the OEM. So can you use a RSA key without RSA? Maybe, but that's not what our primary argument is about here. The GP to this thread stated:
> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.
This is what I'm discussing - the GP would have the government require a device which is designed to work with a very particular online service be able to work... without their service. "Netflix, your Netflix TV stick which is designed to work with the Netflix service must also be able to work without Netflix service." That is what the GP is proposing be made a law, which I very much don't agree with - it literally ignores the entire point for the existence for certain types of hardware such as a Netflix TV stick.
My YubiKey works just fine without an RSA account, go figure
The dirty secret of the Internet - going back decades - is that it's concept of moderation mostly relies upon unstated or understated rules half-enforced and adjudicated by volunteers or underpaid contractors with the power of judge, jury, and executioner. This is arguably by design: the vast majority of what moderators are dealing with is spam, which has the properties of being cheap to execute and difficult to filter for. Hence, anti-spam efforts are swift and merciless. More modern efforts to deal with things like foreign election interference and fake news are arguably extensions of this same ongoing effort to summarily hang and execute spammers.
Facebook is not alone in this either: Google's done it from the very beginning and their death penalty stings far harder. There's a few exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia's ArbCom or other collaborative Free Software projects with code-of-conduct rules and moderator transparency. However, even those platforms will summarily execute spammers.
Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.
Bought the device with the hope that I could register an account for the first time in years, but similar to others, my account was instantly banned with no explanation other than "violating community guidelines."
One of Facebook's arguments against anti-trust accusations has been to point to the lack of consumer harm. This is fairly obvious evidence of material harm to consumers who just bought $500 paperweights.
I'm frankly surprised FB would go this route then, are they assuming only existing FB users will buy? They have to know they've basically killed the ability to create new accounts.
This also happened to me, had an account 5 years ago, stopped using it, deleted the account on their website. Last week decided to create it again to prepare to eventually link to Oculus.. Instantly banned. Literally on the "Confirm Your Email" page got redirected to violated the community guidelines. And I'm not even from the US..
Accessing Facebook from outside the US is likely, through a combination of bad signals, why you tripped the ban hammer. Unfortunately.
Whether it’s a good idea or not, geolocation is a common factor that these models take into account.
- Active = Normal - Deactivated = Deactivated/Not In-Use/Asked to deactivate - Deleted = After asking for deletion, wait (don't log in) for a period of 60? days and your account is deleted.
In my particular scenario, I downloaded my data, went through deletion, waited the period and then confirmed the account was deleted (5y ago).
Lost access to all info within the account, and other things also. Why not just prevent signup in the first place?!?!
People's definition of "real" is so arbitrary in a way that suits them, but it's no less correct than the answer I provide.
Which is just positively-reinforcing tripe making it harder to do anything remotely outside the "norm" even if your intent is 100% non hostile.
- Teenagers should not be on social networks.
- Teenagers who aren't old enough to vote who want to post political memes - that's like 10x me less caring whether they're banned from Facebook.
I have no problem with the ban.
However, Facebook should separate out its identity service from its social networking service. It might make more money doing this because more people would stick to its services. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to authenticate with a Facebook account even though Facebook deems me unworthy of participating in its social network.
Imagine USA moderation of Facebook consists only of pro Trump's fans with power instant ban Your account.
So I started migrating the few apps I used FB logins from, (spotify), then stopped using google login because of facebook. Taught me, not to trust these companies with my 3rd party accounts THAT I PAY FOR.
Sidenote, I got my quest 2 yesterday and from a hardware standpoint, it's blown me away coming from PSVR. Too bad the Facebook nonsense keeps it from being a must have product.
No, this isn't new, more people are just seeing it now since they just expanded the market of users.
It has been like this for years: If you go out of your way to create an account disconnected from a social graph so that it doesn't creepily alert people that would have saved your number/email and uploaded all their contacts in the past, Facebook will ban the account within 10 minutes.
Somebody's inevitable rebuttal: "Yeah but my grandma just made an account and didn't get banned"
Okay, good for you. The described reality here is also valid.
To make it not ban the account you can upload a contact photo and try to friend request multiple people in a social graph. The time limit is very short and you will otherwise very quickly get instabanned or stuck in a security verification loop where the verification never comes.
This is just creepy Facebook behavior for their data mining operation, now masquaraded as "ensuring quality of accounts". This is the same behavior as when they use insecure SMS one time passwords instead of client side code generation, and then use that phone number to add it to the social graph.
Their behavior is very consistent and there is no one individual there responsible for it and even understands the use case.
In this case, this is just another byproduct of Facebook employees living in the warped reality where everyone loves the Facebook product and has it. They honestly believe it there and you should see how confused and affronted they will act when you tell them you don't have an account.
This is just a byproduct of that sentiment.
I will never consider using any service that requires a Facebook account, nor should anyone else.
I imagine our existing consumer-protection laws were passed over the opposition of monied interests. If so, I wonder how close we are to having the political will do to do that again.
Anybody with a mobile phone (as well as a plethora of other products) has inevitably agreed to dozens of pages of legal doctrine which they don't understand, any probably wouldn't without a competent lawyer on hand. But nevertheless, every minor service update, we all hit "I Accept", despite having no understanding of what we've agreed to.
Is this not massively problematic? What happens if a company actually tries to draw significant action against consumers using the terms of service as their contract?
The company I'm working for has a Facebook account that is more or less "broken" — managed by email addresses that no longer work for the company, unmanaged profile page, etc. I also don’t have a personal Facebook account, so I went ahead and created one and then started to clean up the mess.
Immediately my account was deactivated. I went through a process of offering a phone number and countless CAPTCHA's, which would result in my account being reactivated but then deactivated again upon the next login. Eventually I got the "We have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed" ban-hammer.
I'm sort of beyond outrage or even annoyance at this point… it's all just kind of funny and stupid. When I try to figure out a way out of this pickle, the best idea I can come up with is making a bot that logs in to Facebook, wanders around "Liking" q-anon posts, and then I'd have an account that Facebook would accept as a real human being for when I need to get actual work done with their platform.
Support did restore it, eventually. I got the impression it was a one time mercy. This was back in 2010 so their policies may have changed.
"This account has been disabled as a gift subscription that you recently accepted in your account has been reported as fraudulent. The subscription has been removed. We will make an exception in your case and reactivate the account at this time. Please refrain from accepting Steam gifts from unknown sources in the future."
Putting risk on buyers of "stolen goods" is normal, so I wasn't upset at Steam for that part. But having the entire account impacted is another story.
Only large-scale fraud would get you banned, and even then I doubt they would disable your account entirely and not just disable future purchasing.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/30/5563440/john-carmack-face...
Much of the backlash regarding the acquisition has centered on Facebook's business model — data mining and advertising. This isn't a concern for Carmack, who says he "just can't get very worked up about it ." While he appreciates the need for privacy, "the idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me ... I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this?"
So actually he was fine with this from the start? And while he is moving on to AI and whatnot, he is still currently employed by Oculus, which leads me to believe this is his stance today.
I don't know how to feel about it. Even if you look past the privacy issues, he has engineered a product with hardware DRM! It just a shit product.
Of course he doesn’t get worked up because if his assistant calls for support on anything they get routed to the VIP support system and a team of people spring into action to solve the problem for him.
People like Carmack don’t have to use the shitty systems they’re building, so they don’t care. He’s just another rich asshole IMO.
They shot themselves in the foot by having this FB account requirement.
Someone PLEASE make a privacy-first (i.e. "NORMAL") headset with similar specs to the Quest 2 - you can charge more for all I care.
This would work really well for SideQuest, since that would give them greater control over new features they can ship.
There parallels with any of these giant single user account companies.
If I could create a fake FB account and not be banned, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
I just don't see how that is justified. The seller isn't defrauding anyone and isn't using violence themselves. It's so much more easy and ethical to just not buy the product. All you can do is take personal responsibility. Calling for violent coercion like you've done is wrong.
I wonder if there are any statistics around e-waste for devices that are "bricked" due to an account lockout.
I think Facebook wants to make VR fun and appropriate for everyone. One way to do that is to tie in people's real identities. Facebook threads aren't great, but they are better than twitter threads, and A LOT better than interactions in VRChat.
FWIW, I have a few fakebook accounts, with names like Nopey Nofookinwae, and they're still active... Never bought anything from Oculus Store, though.
Facebook is really shooting themselves in the foot here, imo.
But a VR headset is not a chat device any more than a keyboard is a chat device. It's a general I/O device that can be used for all sorts of experiences, including single-user ones.
I’m asking rhetorically. All this info and more is available to anyone with a full name and photograph via people-finder sites like Spokeo and SocialCatfish, which is exactly what Facebook accounts with a “real name policy” expose to the world. Using this info, any anonymous troll who you tick off in a VR game can send a SWAT team to your house, or tie up your phone lines, or harass your family and employer, or attempt to do you real physical harm. The Internet creates an extreme asymmetry of power between the abuser and the abused, and there are lots of unstable abusers out there with nothing more exciting to do than make your life hell.
The Mark Zuckerbergs and Larry Pages of the world live in gated communities with many layers of people between them and the world, so they don’t care about any of this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5z4i/i_dont_under... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb86d1/facebook_del... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb701s/guys_i_reall... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jb5wrs/my_facebook_... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jannlj/facebook_req... https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jaq477/facebook_scr... https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/jawv6g/how_sho...
I recommend creating a separate account if you have no other options.
Maintain your own private site of family and friends pictures that you own and share around with people you care about. It’s not that hard and replicates most of the real value of a social network for most people.
Is it data? If so what’s the expected value of data they’d get from quest linkage?
Data such as; information provided at sign up, web/links to other users based on sign up info, inferred location information, purchases, interests, visited products, used products, active hours, usage hours, general use metrics... etc
Good thing, it's a "soft" ban. They do not allow to log in, but if you are logged in, it's fine. So i could use my bought items even though I could not log in in browser. But if I would have logged out from Oculus, I wouldn't be able to use them.
Staying away from anything facebook related.
Not being able to create a burner account is a deal breaker
For mobile VR? Quest one, that's it.
For wireless? Index/Vive with wireless attachment. That'll be 2-3 times the cost though, and you'll need a PC and router to drive that.
I even have a Facebook, but I don't get why they need this information.
That’s important because I believe the revenue generating model is entirely from data. Even if I’m wrong, it’s Facebook, so we know they’re after data for profit.
And consider the kind of data that VR is capable of collecting. It’s biometric data at its core. If you take the data involved in VR, tie it to a person under the real-name policy, and give it to some crafty software engineers, you can get some crazy intimate results.
My point is that regulating this space of tech will only lead to less innovation. There’s an extremely easy solution that every single one of us can do: don’t buy it, don’t be tempted by the cheap price Facebook is offering. I closed my Fb account ~5 years ago now (after being on it for about 10 years) and I’m very tempted to buy Quest 2, but I won’t. If enough people do this, what ever scummy plan Facebook is weaving will fail, but even if it doesn’t, you’d be out of it.
You might be ultimately right about this, but you certainly haven't proved it. A common theme is a large company will use its leverage to make a product that is better and cheaper than the alternatives, demolish their competition, and the sit on their laurels for the next decade, with the exception of a few updates that provide vendor specific features to encourage vendor lock-in.
In short, Occulus could become the new IE 5/6.
https://www.gov.uk/accepting-returns-and-giving-refunds for example says (from a seller's point of view) that "Customers have up to 6 years to make a claim for an item they’ve bought from you (5 years in Scotland)."
However I see no reason that you couldn't sue the manufacturer if they arrange to break your product even after six years. That would be a tort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort) and unrelated to your rights under your contract of sale.
I am not sure about the UK and how they implement the directives. But in Denmark it is most definitely not an urban myth.
VIVE Cosmos Valve Index HP Reverb G2
Just don't use the account for anything else.
Maybe they ban them if you try to buy something (because the name doesn't match or something)? Which would be a ridiculous thing to do, but hey, I've seen worse...
Regardless, I just don't see any use for Facebook besides messaging. Sad that Oculus headsets require FB accounts.
I believe that with heavy handed actions like this, Facebook will alienate Oculus buyers, which aren't your typical Facebook user. I hope that will make them change their approach.
Personally, I couldn't care less about customized ads and "relevant" notifications. But getting your account banned, with all the contacts on it, and all the purchases, is just so anti-customer I don't understand who in their right mind would do it.
They definitely will, I wanted to get my first VR headset and that move took Oculus out of the running for me. I was leaning towards their headsets because local pricing for Vive -- not to mention Index -- is horrible, but there's no way I'm linking it to my Facebook.
Anyways, this has nothing to do with your issue. Facebook should be ashamed for treating paying customers like this.
I've never bought anything from the Oculus store. I honestly only use VR for Skybox and movies I download to a file server.
Are there any alternative OSes for the GO? Honestly I'd rather just get off the stock OS if I just had a way to play my movies.
Yeah, this sucks. But mistaken account deactivations probably happen a lot - how to handle them is one of the FAQ questions on Oculus. It happened to me with my PlayStation 4 account too; someone in Germany mistakenly signed up using my email address somehow and in the resulting confusion I got locked out of my PlayStation games for a bit. It sucks but support will eventually fix it.