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The worst part of the Facebook/Oculus integration is that there's no way to log out--you can't even revoke the login remotely via the Facebook settings page whi
by jimrandomh 6y ago
The worst part of the Facebook/Oculus integration is that there's no way to log out--you can't even revoke the login remotely via the Facebook settings page which can do that for any other device--so anyone who has access to your headset has access to your Facebook account and your Messenger history, forever.
With Quest 1, which had a separate account system, I would frequently show off the headset by letting people try it on. With Quest 2, anyone who tries it on would have full access to my Facebook account and Messenger history, so I can't do that. And no, they don't give you any sort of warning about this, you have to figure it out yourself.
(I reported this to their bug bounty program on October 26. The submission was rejected as a duplicate. I rechecked today and it was still not fixed.)
- btown 6y agoClearly not being able to log out is a feature, not a bug. Mother Facebook is looking out for you by ensuring you're incentivized not to share your hardware with other people. After all, who knows what nefarious things they might do to it! And you wouldn't even be able to hang out with them in VR! If they wanted a headset, they should just get their own. 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. With the new Oculus Direct program, you can just tell your friends they can rent-to-own a headset at $0 down, 0% APR for 12 months. And as a Oculus Direct Ohana Team Member, you can even get a credit to your own Oculus bill for every new user who signs up for Oculus Direct from your referrals, as well as a credit for every new user they sign up, and so on! And if you grow your network wide enough, you can build that network into a business! Contact us for more details about the benefits of joining the Oculus Direct Ohana!
- KaiserPro 6y agoYou're assuming that there is a coherent driving force here. I suspect that its more a case that they literally haven't thought about it.
- jjulius 6y agoForgive my ignorance, but how could something as simple as logging out most likely be something "that they literally haven't thought about"? I, at least, would assume that that would be considered a basic/essential feature.
- amelius 6y agoProbably all of the engineers working at Oculus thought about it. That doesn't mean the company's "collective mind" thought about it, however.
- incompleteCode 6y agoI'm sure they've thought about it, and rejected it. If the product heads haven't given thought to this despite being more than aware of the current anti-trust environment, then they're just incompetent.
- wanderer2323 6y agomore likely the company's "collective mind" intentionally deprioritized/removed this feature
- cool_dude85 6y agoThe lengths some people are willing to go to absolve FB of wrongdoing here are pretty incredible. Concretely, I'm sure the problem has been brought up plenty of times by plenty of people. However, the log out button got clogged up in the phlogiston at FB and they're having a hell of a time looking for it!
- lovegoblin 6y agoI think it's not an attempt at absolution so much as Hanlon's Razor.
- nitrogen 6y ago
- saddlerustle 6y agoThat's a very cynical take. From what I hear support for multiple user profiles is shipping soon, it's just not done yet.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoAnd that release will introduce a "bug" where the microphone will always be on. A totally unrelated bug will release advertising metrics from the audio and headset user login history to advertisers. They'll fix the bugs but unwittingly cause...
- hobs 6y agoA cynical take? Oculus is a locked down ecosystem that fb purposefully sharded off. Anything but cynicism regarding this product is w-e-i-r-d.
- chaostheory 6y agoI'm more in agreement with you here. imo This is more a stupidity and not malice situation, but the other side has plenty of valid points, most of which is from Facebook's own history. They're not a good actor historically and the best way to predict the future is to look at history.
- 908087 6y agoAre we seriously still doing the "stupidity not malice" thing for ~$800B advertising corporations with a long and well-docunented history of malicious actions behind them?
- mrits 6y agoI don't see Facebook alone in this. The whole gaming industry is headed this direction. Most of my game purchases are in Steam. PS5 has a digital only version.
- bobthepanda 6y agoIn addition many physical copies, if not most or all, mostly are either straight up a redemption for an online key or are functionally telling your system to go download it. Optical drives haven’t been standard issue in PCs for a while now.
- solinent 6y agoWe need to allow multiple app stores with DRM per store, it's the only solution to avoid a monopolistic store that I see. It won't happen except through the legal system, I think.
- entropicdrifter 6y agoI mean, on PC we already have that, plus a few DRM-free stores like GoG
- TheKarateKid 6y agoThere's a difference between forcing you to use a gaming account for a gaming service, and forcing you to use a social media account entirely irrelevant to gaming with your entire real-life identity (and web history, ad profiling, and in-store purchases) to use a gaming service.
- mrits 6y agoI don't see too much that Facebook collects about you that Steam doesn't. If you aren't using a Facebook desktop app Steam probably knows quite a bit more about you actually. If you are really concerned about your "real-life identity" I'd recommend not publishing it in a service that is made for public consumption
- saddlerustle 6y ago
- triceratops 6y ago> Mother Facebook is looking out for you by ensuring you're incentivized not to share your hardware with other people. Fighting its own lonely battle against Covid. /s
- dheera 6y agoI really don't understand why so many people would finance a headset instead of just setting the cash aside in a stable investment and owning 12 months later. For immediate necessities like a car or mobile phone I get it, but a VR headset isn't a necessity. Own later instead of financing. You might even be able to buy used at half price in 12 months.
- crispyporkbites 6y agoSo you can’t sell it either? Reminds me of digital games that cost the same as a physical copy, but you can’t resell.
- yladiz 6y agoI'm not sure about all Oculus products, but I had an Oculus Go and I was able to reset it, so I was able to sell it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- filoleg 6y agoCan confirm the same from my own experience with Oculus Q1+Q2
- whatch 6y agoIsn't there some sort of hard reset?
- amelius 6y agoYou can't sell it? Is such a limitation even allowed by law?
- jonny_eh 6y agoYou can factory reset it.
- Tactic 6y agoYou can factory reset it.
- filoleg 6y agoIdk where this comes from, you absolutely can. Hardware factory reset on Oculus Quest devices (both 1 and 2) is a thing. I did it myself last month, as I was giving away my Quest 1 headset, it is pretty simple. It would be extremely strange if that wasn't possible.
- joshxyz 6y agoJeez talk about being unable to log out in Messenger without having to log in a new user, its annoying AF. Those fuckers who thought and approved of that should be kicked in the nuts by steel-toe-shoe-wearing professionally frustrated soccer players.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chaostheory 6y agoThe best most ironic part of the forced Facebook login is that you still have to manually add your Facebook friends as your Oculus friends. Unlike with IG, it doesn't even suggest your Facebook friends to be friends. If adding Facebook friends who joined Oculus was automatic, at least you can argue there was immediate utility, but as of right now it feels like they're just signalling that FB will watch your every move and spy on you.
- JPKab 6y agoAs a person without a facebook account, I feel locked out of many things I shouldn't be. 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- freehunter 6y agoFacebook really did and does fill a need that's been open for a very long time: a central communications/notification platform. It's been tried time and time again, with both open standards and closed standards, but Facebook is the one that caught on (very unfortunately). For a few years I ran a successful business in my small-but-bustling town of using the Facebook Events API to pull in all the events in the area and putting them on a single calendar, then pushing those events back to my business's Facebook page before the event started. At that point everyone in town can either visit my website or follow my Facebook page, and now they have one central place to get all the town's news. I could never convince business owners to put all their events on my site directly, because "our audience is all on Facebook already" but people would have to follow a couple dozen pages and check them each individually (because Facebook won't show you everything you've followed). Facebook eventually shut down that API (with no notice, against their own SLAs) and I kept scraping the data by hand because the residents and the businesses found it so useful. Then the pandemic hit and these small businesses had no money to pay me and they weren't holding events anymore anyway. But even after we're done with the pandemic I doubt I'll be picking it back up because Facebook is an abusive business partner to begin with, and the people you're then forced to interact with on Facebook are some of the worst and most toxic human beings I've ever met. I've had death threats from my own neighbors because an event I advertised was sold out. I've had Facebook followers stop me on the street and complain to me about taxes and zoning because they can't tell the difference between a news outlet and the city government. But it really does highlight that Facebook is meeting a demand that nothing else, not email or RSS or SMS or anything has been able to meet. It's just a shame that they're the worst possible company to make a social network that you'd actually want to interact with.
- jayd16 6y agoThe Quest OS is Android based and multiple accounts in Android is still kind of buggy and niche. 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.
- gknoy 6y agoI get the idea that the device can only know about one account at a time, but it's absurd that you can't do a factory reset on the hardware and then revoke the credentials from your FB account. ("I no longer own this hardware...", or "my Oculus was stolen".)
- filoleg 6y ago>it's absurd that you can't do a factory reset on the hardware and then revoke the credentials from your FB account. You can do that. I literally did it 2 weeks ago, when I was giving away my Quest 1 headset to someone. Was a pretty smooth and simple process.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago> The worst part of the Facebook/Oculus integration is that there's no way to log out--you can't even revoke the login remotely via the Facebook settings page which can do that for any other device--so anyone who has access to your headset has access to your Facebook account and your Messenger history, forever. 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.
- MrZongle2 6y agoI'd even go as far as suggesting that everyone delete their Facebook accounts now.
- Naracion 6y agoThis makes me wonder, what does happen if you're logged in to Quest 2 with your Facebook account, and then you delete your Facebook profile? Do you lose access to the Quest? Do you get a fresh device? Do you get to keep your purchases, since I assume the purchases are now linked to your Facebook account?
- marricks 6y agoI mean, I think the worst part is the implicit loss of privacy baked into tying the accounts and the eventual data goldmine VR/AR will be for FB. 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.
- shoulderfake 6y agoI would never get that thing because of facebook
- abrookewood 6y agoDoes this effectively mean you can't sell the devices once used? [Edit]: Looks like you can reset it, so you can sell it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]