Credit where credit is due: The Meta Quest virtual reality platform, formerly known as Oculus Quest, will soon be removing its obnoxious Facebook account mandate. As announced on Thursday, beginning August, both new and existing Quest headset users will be able to use the system’s default operating system and digital download store without linking their “real” social media accounts to the service.
This is a good course correction of a bad decision. In 2020, I wrote extensively about the dangers of VR’s “Facebookening,” which arose when the Quest VR platform ditched its existing Oculus account system in favor of the required Facebook accounts. This decision forced a cross-fertilization between VR headsets and years of social media posts and messages, including the cookies and metadata of connected sites and services. It required a level of “real name” compliance that we’ve never seen from other major Western computing devices and operating systems.
Worse, the move silently threatened anyone who wanted to circumvent the rules by creating a fake Facebook account. Facebook bans aliases and fake names, and while it doesn’t check for ID when creating an account, it can lock accounts at any time if it detects “suspicious” activity. To unlock an account, the company will usually ask for some form of “official” photo ID. If someone converted their Oculus account to a name like “Guy Incognito” and got stuck in a locked state, Facebook had ample right (granted by the terms of service) to keep the account and all associated software purchases locked up.
Awaiting a better look at FB disconnect
As announced, the new “Meta Account” system will fix some of these most glaring issues. But will it be enough?
It is difficult to definitively answer this question. First, the new account system hasn’t gone live, so we can’t test a critical aspect of the change. According to Meta, anyone who has switched from an Oculus account to a Facebook-bound identity will be able to unlink all Facebook identity information from August while creating a new Meta account.
We want to see what this update looks like: how the software purchase transfer will work, what notices may appear on affected Facebook accounts after the transfer, and how aggressive the company will be in asking Quest users if they sure they want to break Facebook from their headset experience. (Meta has already indicated that users can add Facebook and Instagram credentials if they wish.) Facebook representatives have not answered our questions about these concerns as of press time.
There is also the question of exactly what traces of Facebook user data can be left behind. This week we’re still reeling from a valid accusation, linked to a lawsuit, about Facebook’s official policy to “undo” apparently deleted account data when requested by law enforcement agencies. A Meta spokesperson said the claims were “uncredited,” but even if that’s true, we already know that Facebook has made sensitive user data available to bidders and openly manipulated social media experiences for the sake of experimentation. Facebook is in the business of collecting as much user data as possible and keeping all relevant user data available for as long as possible – so much so that we haven’t yet found any clarification on Facebook’s meta-account decoupling data. each of the company’s new ToS disclosures unveiled this week.
