Facebook being investigated in Germany for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts

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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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.

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.

Maybe they'll add a guest mode or something.

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.

Reminds me of digital games that cost the same as a physical copy, but you can’t resell.

Those fuckers who thought and approved of that should be kicked in the nuts by steel-toe-shoe-wearing professionally frustrated soccer players.

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.

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.

Better to get the Valve Index.

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.

Can it? Doesn’t Oculus Link only work via the Oculus desktop application, which also requires sign-in?

Or you know stop doing that.

What would be your strategy for holding a mirror to these people and to make these jobs undesirable?

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.

Thoughtful clarity would be nice.

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.

So now it is worse.

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.

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.

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.

[0] https://boingboing.net/tag/real-names

The EU has hit Google with considerable fines already.

That's frustrating.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.