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Comment by somehnacct3757 | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't that you need a Facebook account, it's that Meta owns Oculus at all. Call the account whatever you want; if I'm a record in any of Meta's databases then I expect to be linked to a shadow profile and surveilled for their profit. The only control I have over the situation is to never agree to any ToS relationship with Meta. There's literally nothing they can do to change this short of selling Oculus to someone else.

The day Meta bought Oculus they killed the platform for privacy-conscious webizens. I say this as someone who would love to try the Soda Island VR experiences and often lament the acquisition.

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"they killed the platform for privacy-conscious webizen"

They are okay with this, because that a VERY small portion of the population.

Most people couldn't care less about what a company does with their data as long as they provide a good product.

We have over a year of data now from Apple's app tracking transparency feature. Only 25% of users have opted in and the trend line is not promising. I think the HN crowd is way ahead of the curve on this topic, but still a good indicator of global sentiment.

There is a difference between "Do you want to be tracked" and "Would you be willing to pay more for a headset that is not made by Facebook". If privacy is free, people will take it. If privacy adds 100$+ to the price tag, people will still pick the cheaper option every time.

People may remove the choice from themselves by supporting data privacy laws.

I think if privacy laws were to be made that restrict what data the Oculus can snoop, Meta wouldn't raise the price to compensate. They would sell or shelve the entire Oculus brand and endeavor.

VR has little value to Meta other than a way to sneak cameras and microphones into your home. If you've seen what the Kinect could do a decade ago with IR cameras, the Oculus has those. The Kinect could monitor your heart rate in real time and track multiple bodies.

Nobody will be thinking about the Oculus when they pass the laws, but they may be thinking about Echos and Nest cams and pass laws to restrict audio and video snooping. So Oculus is along for the ride even at its current level of irrelevance.

Even among "privacy-conscious webizen", I take privacy seriously, I have my Nextcloud homelab, private email, use uBlock, use Wireguard on my phone, and use Linux, yet I have an Oculus Quest 2 with a Facebook account, because that kind of tracking is frankly not worrying to me. I use it to play video games. Of all the places where they can track my interest this is not one I worry about.

Amongst "normal" people Facebook is simply not a dealbreaker. My real concern with VR adoption is much more that my family simply does not see it as interesting.

To be fair the Oculus Quest 2 has literally 4 (5?) cameras and internal view of your house, so it's potentially even more invasive than tracking on the web. I own one too but this is something that bothers me every time I take it out of the box.

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