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Comment by slowin | Hacker News Reader

I had an Oculus Quest and it was a really great device. After the "Meta" rebrand, the quality rapidly decreased and now it wants me to upload my ID to Meta to keep using it. Absolutely not! Zuckerberg already has way too much information on me, uploading my state issued identification to them is such an insane ask, I will never do it. While this looks like interesting hardware, the company behind it has unacceptable and user-hostile practices, so I'll pass.

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I've never needed to submit any ID?

I think the software kept getting better except for the latest UI redesign intended to mimic Apple which is indeed terrible. I hate the heavy use of double clicking on the controllers. The older UI was better (though even before this they constantly redesigned it every 6 months or so)

But they've only improved things over time. The quest 1 shipped without passthrough or hand tracking. By the end of it's support it had both. The quest 2 and 3 also continue to receive new features like higher frame rates, keyboard view etc.

If you already had a long standing fb profile you were probably good. But if you had to make a new one just for Quest, you could sometimes end up having to go through all kinds of hoops to prove you weren't making a spam bot account. Or if you tried to access a long forgotten account.

You don't need a fb profile for quest. I'm sure that you could use one but you can create a new meta account for which you just need an email.

No I didn't. During the time when it was required to couple one I just made one with a fake name. But since that passed i decoupled it again and deleted the Facebook one.

All of the social media have this issue: the fraud detection algorithm become oversensitized and starts flagging every new accounts. But it's not the policy, so the company won't admit to mandating ID submission.

Not that I am comfortable uploading ID or that I even consider Quest, but that is how it starts.

Facebook is the only social media I've ever had this kind of problem with. Every few years I find some group or community that only exists on Facebook that I want to join (in the most recent case it was a local DnD meetups group; in a previous case, it was a gardening group that was my only reputable lead on seeds for an uncommon variety of heirloom tomato I was searching for). It always ends in my new account getting banned within a few days for suspected fraud with no real reason or opportunity for appeal. No other social media has that problem as far as I can tell, it seems like it's primarily a Facebook problem, and clearly I'm not some unique case considering how common a story it seems.

Perhaps it has something to do with if you had an old account you deleted a decade ago; maybe Meta assumes that any person who ever deleted their account will never ever want to make a new one, so anybody using the same email or name or face or ID or device as anything that has touched a deleted account is by definition fraudulent.

Exactly where I am. Was all-in on Quest 1 and Quest 2, but had to offboard due to Meta's wild policies (that ended up locking me out of my account with little recourse -- some bug with the Oculus standalone account merge with FB and then re-split).

As much as I'm a proponent of VR, I won't play by Meta's rules.

Could you get a refund for the device? Obviously that wasn't what you paid for.

I was so excited by Oculus’s technology, and then Facebook of all companies bought them and it was such a let down. It felt like finding out that Charles Manson likes the same TV show as you. Yuck!

oculus didnt ship a single product not owned by facebook.

Correct, but you didn't have to log into the Quest 1 with facebook until ~2024. They had "Oculus accounts" at first.

They have Meta accounts now, which are also not Facebook accounts. I went straight from an Oculus account to Meta account. Might be location based, but I most certainly haven't been asked to upload any ID.

> They have Meta accounts now, which are also not Facebook accounts.

How gullible can you be?

Well, I was going to point out the distinction between products. But I guess if people like you are able to turn HN into Reddit, anything is possible.

And I was pointing out that they are one and the same but the "Facebook" name was so tarnished by their terrible privacy practices they had to change it to save face.

But I guess if people like you are able to ignore that to make yourself feel better about giving your personal information to Zuckerberg's advertising company then anything is possible.

Phwoar! Thank you. It's 2026, and had it not been for your high quality informative comments. I would have not known anything about this them there Facebook. You saved me.

I don't know what conversation you think you're having here, but it's not that.

If you'd bothered to read... and then ready for it... stop, take a breath, and process the information. You'd have noticed I was pointing out you can use a Quest headset WITHOUT providing them your personal ID OR having a Facebook account. Almost as if, you know, I was highlighting that giving the company your personal info isn't required. Woe me though for pointing that out.

I'm sorry for interrupting the indignant rants. Please continue.

I got some hate from pointing out WhatsApp is the same evil corp as Facebook recently. People don't want to hear that

Pretty sure DK1 shipped pre-acquisition.

DK2 also

Neither qualifies.

Why? They were for sale to the public, how were they not a product?

Because some people find arguing over semantics fun.

That is certainly not true.

I had the Oculus Rift dev kit before they sold to Facebook. It was so amazing at the time

“Dev kit”

You had to pay for it (Kickstarter), so its 100% a product

Game console developers always had to (and still have to) pay for their dev kits. That doesn't really make them products in the typical sense of the word, though.

The stronger argument for it being a product is that it was available to the public.

I didn’t even get it from the kickstarter.

I just bought it on the website.

Yeah, sure, my point is that obviously the original comment excluded the dev kit in their definition of product, and arguing over it is just splitting hairs.

Non-devs were buying them to play games.

I was one of them.

I mean, I was/am a dev, but I had no plans to develop on it, I just wanted it to play with.

They called it that, but I just bought it on their website like a normal product. I didn’t write anything for it.

There was a site that you could download experiences that people created, which is what I used it for.

Owner of DK2 here, well before Facebook acquisition. It was for developers, but it was a shipped product nonetheless.

Not really. Pre-release baked into the name.

Sold for a full price, so it’s a sold product.

It wasn't though, a full price would have been more, to cover not just components and assembly but the cost of R&D.

Game console dev kits usually cost more than the consoles they're for, not less. They're not mass produced at the scale that the consoles are, and they're sold or leased to companies expecting to make several orders of magnitude more back off the products they create with the dev kits.

There isn't a very direct comparison of Oculus products to game consoles like PlayStation, Nintendo, XBox, or those in the distant past. It is interesting, and they have a lot of the same market forces at play, but I don't think they behave by the same rules.

There's at least one way where there's a direct comparison: they both have dev kits.

Game console dev kits are typically _more_ expensive than the consoles they're for. So "full price" isn't a good argument. (The fact that they were available to the public is a stronger argument.)

i've never had the luxury of buying a cheaper dev kit. Ever.

they shipped 3. DK1, DK2, CV1.

CV1 was as a Facebook subsidiary. Acquired 2014-07-21, CV1 announced January 2016 and released March 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/21/facebooks-acquisition-of-o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift_CV1

4 if you count the Latency Tester.. but yo.. Mark and Andrew.. pour these ARVR $$$ into CZI instead!!!

> oculus didnt ship a single product not owned by facebook.

The post you are replying to doesn't claim they did...?

They did change the branding in late 2021/early 2022.

Prior to that the product was called the Oculus Quest, after that it was the Meta Quest.

And Meta did start heavily enshittifying the product alongside the rebrand.

Regardless the acquisition took some time to bring down the quality of the products. It doesn't matter if their first few products were sufficiently far ahead that they weren't enshitified immediately when Facebook bought Oculus.

This is why he buys anything. I can't speak to Whatsapp but Instagram is horrific now precisely because he doesn't give a damn about making a good product. All he wants is to own the network effects, and credentials, and data

well a 200-day (dirtyfrag) just dropped yesterday. you can remove most of that

More info? Couldn't find anything about it and now the Quest communities are swamped with these glasses.

edit: https://github.com/Lumince/singularity

yea that. it works on latest fw

> After the "Meta" rebrand, the quality rapidly decreased

This has not been my experience at all and there are very few headsets I have not owned.

Everything else I can't really disagree with.

It’s rather astonishing to me how the vampire squid of world domination has apparently worked out just how to neutralize any sense of self-preservation, and manipulate and gaslight anything into place if they have enough time and are patient.

Everything from “freedom sticks” to get women to breath in smoke and ash like the foolish men, to going from “government IDs are just conspiracy theory” to “you have to show your papers to see information and communicate with other humans on the only method that is still widely possible; it’s all just been slowly salami sliced and microdosed into our societies. Worse yet, still a large chunk of society seem utterly oblivious as long as they can consume their particular customized and personalized opiate of the masses.

They recently managed to crack open the bootloader, most of meta stuff can be bypassed now. I despise how it went from a great device to almost a paperweight with just horrible software updates (as it's the norm these days).

That’s the bootloader of the original Quest

The one that needed it the most. Very excited to see what's going to grow out of this hack

How do they explain why they need your ID to use VR glasses?

Age verification.

Yes but why do you need to verify your age to use computer hardware?

They can't stand the idea you'd use it without a social media account. It's Facebook after all.

You shouldn't have to do this and I won't. I'll vote with my dollars and never buy another device from them. It's too bad because I genuinely liked it as well, but it's not worth the invasion of privacy and normalizing sending this type of information to any consumer company.

Because people are naive enough to think the huge privacy compromise will be worth the cost to society in order to protect kids.

The better question is why in 5yrs we will have to use ID to buy a product on some random ecommerce site or to play a video game or use Uber or post a comment on Reddit. It will be because people pushed for this for kids on social media and opened the door for the rest of the internet companies to demand it and therefore the government.

I really hate it when some vague "people" are blamed for this bullshit. those who do -- a minority -- do it only because they've been brainwashed by the relentless public opinion campaign ran jointly by the capital and the governments.

No brainwashing needed, the vast majority of people don’t care one bit about privacy

the vast majority of people would object to having a camera in every room of their dwelling. they just don't realize that having spyware on every piece of electronics they own is even worse.

They don’t care. Even if you explain everything in details, in a way they understand. We’ve been having that arguments since 2 decades, it’s now pretty clear they don’t care. They will complain about flock, then 2 minutes after sign up for Muse and share all their personal data with Meta, even if told what that’s used for

Think of the children … or are your a chomo? Now hand over your papers for access to information and communications more that all the books have been fed into the AI shredder and paper and writing instruments were done away with to save the planet.

For the same reason you need to show ID to go into a bar/pub.

Facebook/Meta has a system that decides if it thinks you are lying about your name or if it just isn't sure, if you get flagged for ID verification. These days it might also be because they think you are under 18, but the ID verification system existed long long before age checking.

If you haven't seen it, it's probably because your account is old and they have scraped enough contact lists to believe your name is real.

You don't need to use a real name on a meta headset. It was decoupled from Facebook years ago.

Odd. I’ve used a fake name with Facebook since about 2009 and now I have a meta quest and they’ve never flagged my account or asked for id verification.

The facebook "Real Name" policy is from like 2013. You just haven't gotten anyone's attention. Not using your real name is against policy and a bannable offense.

Come get me zuck.

What does your state ID have that Facebook can't already get?

I don’t believe Facebook has my full address. Yeah, they could probably get it but that doesn’t mean I want to help them.

I think you're underestimating Facebook if you think they don't know your address.

The aggressive push for ID verification is a direct result of massive government lawsuits regarding online child safety. As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.

Plus they already have all that data... Your ID is not private information. It's an identifier that they don't need or want.

> As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.

Not for allowing you to use your own hardware, what utter nonsense.

It was their choice to forcibly link their hardware to their online account system despite it working fine without it. But it’s absolutely not true that the government requires age verification for using VR goggles.

Yeah, you beat me to this - I laughed at Meta needing any information considering shadow profiles have always existed and every company leaks data like a sieve xD

Facebook was doing ID checks well before this because they want to stop ban evasion.

ID checks just came to the Quest because they forced facebook accounts which already had ID checks on it. They should never have made facebook accounts mandatory for playing games.

I think the causality is a bit mixed up here given Meta have put millions of dollars into child safety lobbying

What's their motive there?

I'm honestly not sure. Often when companies lobby for regulation it's to avoid other types of regulation they would find more troublesome. I don't buy the popular narrative that Meta is lobbying for verification laws for the purpose of getting ID data because surely they have a lot of signal there already. At the same time I think it's backwards to say "Meta are behaving this way because of regulation" when they actively lobbied for it.

Obviously, none of us have any proof, but I'm on board with the theory that they've been lobbying for it to push things subtly. Specifically because it looks like a lot of these laws are being made to absolve the person creating the gate of responsibility and liability when the gate is there, even if it fails. The idea of the theory being that if they can push that part in then it's better off for them rather than if it's done in a vacuum where they can end up responsible.

It makes it impossible for anyone except huge existing players to have a legal social network if there are enough hoops to jump through to run one.

Smaller entrants to the field cannot as easily comply with the law. It’s about raising barriers to entry. Trust in Meta might be low here, but to the general public, it’s higher than some small startup they’ve never heard of, so they won’t upload their ids there.

I linked to two articles describing Meta's fight to have age verification laws put into place (even before the settlement). The most obvious reason is to try to get some sort of law in place that they believe they can comply with _without_ having to make changes to their algorithms in a way that might hurt their business.

I don't think they particularly _want_ legal id (though maybe they do? who knows)... but it's obviously false that this was caused by the government when Meta itself was lobbying for such laws even before then.

https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...

https://thedeepdive.ca/who-pushes-age-verification-bills/

Creates another expensive bar for prospective challengers to clear - regulation nearly always ends up favouring incumbents, especially if they have a hand in shaping it.

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