Oculus Quest user breaks neck, then Facebook deletes his account | Hacker News Reader

Oculus Quest user breaks neck, then Facebook deletes his account

reddit.com

28 pointsneartheplain11 comments

Let’s ignore the accident or the person involved.

Is it reasonable at this point for any company to retroactively brick a device and delete purchased software products without providing a reason, and a refund for the physical device?

For the software I’d want a refund but given that companies have taken to claiming all software sales are “licenses” that can be revoked, and lawmakers seem willing to accept that, I have little hope to see refunds happen.

He commented with some more details:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/kg1761/after_postin...

I hate Facebook, but...

Read the longer set of responses. It is quite possible that FB deleted the account prior to the injury and for reasons related to posting content that would result in anyone's account being deleted.

In my opinion the story isn't about what was done to 'deserve' or to not deserve the ban, it's that there doesn't have to be any transparency, accountability, or anything of the sort.

Now that bans from services can delete peoples' games they have purchased, photos they have stored, notes they have taken, and, well, everything else, it would be nice if we started paying attention to how little rights consumers have here more.

It sounds like the "other reasons" that people are speculating on (without evidence) are that he might have clicked the Like button on some edgy content? That's a lame reason to take away hundreds of dollars of purchases from someone.

TBH it sounds like a lot of those people on reddit are basing that speculation off of a misunderstanding of the TOS page. "Here's some but not all of the reasons why Facebook bans accounts" is a far cry from "Your account was banned for this reason"

Edit: it looks like the reddit comments accusing the guy of being a white supremacist were taken down so I don't know if we're referring to the same thing. OTOH, Facebook has told people that posting pictures of competing VR hardware is a TOS violation for guns so it's probably just some crappy automated system that got tripped https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/jxd3tl

>OTOH, Facebook has told people that posting pictures of competing VR hardware is a TOS violation for guns

Could be a mis-trained image classifier that triggers on black pistol grips.

That is speculation. We have no way to know what led to the ban. The person who is banned has no way to know, either. Facebook has given no indication.

When Twitter bans or suspends someone, they say which tweet(s) broke the rules, and which rules were broken. There is no reason why Facebook cannot do the same. It would clarify rightful bans, and make contesting wrongful bans easier.

Bricking someone's $300 device like this without warning or recourse is incredibly anti-consumer.

I don't have an Oculus but have heard good things about it. But I can't get one because my Facebook account was similarly shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response.

I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account. I want my own back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com