Comment by slowin
14 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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oculus didnt ship a single product not owned by facebook.
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”
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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.
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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.
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Pretty sure DK1 shipped pre-acquisition.
DK2 also
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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.
they shipped 3. DK1, DK2, CV1.
4 if you count the Latency Tester.. but yo.. Mark and Andrew.. pour these ARVR $$$ into CZI instead!!!
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
> 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.
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
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
> 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.
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
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?
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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.
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.
You don't need to use a real name on a meta headset. It was decoupled from Facebook years ago.
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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.
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?
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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.
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
> 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.