Facebook's Account Verification Leaves Some Quest 2 Buyers With 'Paperweight' (uploadvr.com) 54
Quest 2 is the first Oculus headset to require a Facebook account at launch. False positives from its account verification system may be leaving some buyers with no choice but to return it. UploadVR reports: We're seeing reports from Quest 2 buyers who aren't on Facebook finding difficulty creating an account. Facebook's account verification system -- reportedly administered by a machine learning agent -- may ask for photographic evidence of identity. That evidence seems to be reviewed by a human, since it can apparently take weeks to process. Others trying to re-activate old accounts to use their brand new Quest 2 also report instant suspensions. Trying to create a new account also fails.
If the review fails or your account is suspended, there appears to be no recourse for appeal. Multiple buyers called the system a "paperweight" in their emails to us about their interactions with customer service and what they feel like they can do with the latest VR headset on the market. In an emailed statement, a Facebook spokesperson said Quest 2 customers should contact Oculus Customer support to work through issues. Facebook claimed to only have "a very small number" of Oculus users running into login issues. Among the screenshots from Twitter and Reddit users reporting issues are Oculus Support agents supposedly saying they're unable to help with Facebook account issues.
If the review fails or your account is suspended, there appears to be no recourse for appeal. Multiple buyers called the system a "paperweight" in their emails to us about their interactions with customer service and what they feel like they can do with the latest VR headset on the market. In an emailed statement, a Facebook spokesperson said Quest 2 customers should contact Oculus Customer support to work through issues. Facebook claimed to only have "a very small number" of Oculus users running into login issues. Among the screenshots from Twitter and Reddit users reporting issues are Oculus Support agents supposedly saying they're unable to help with Facebook account issues.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep.
"10 failures" certainly looks like a small number to a boss so long as you don't tell him you only sold 12 of them.
Re:And this is why (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that you can't refuse consent for processing of personal data without detriment, and consent is the only viable legitimate basis for the processing, this is a clear GDPR violation.
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Not quite but it is a violation of other laws. Even before the GDPR many places in the EU (possibly an EU law? not sure) banned the practice of one company requiring you to sign up for an account in another. The Quest 2 isn't on sale in Germany for this reason and other EU countries are reviewing the practice of forcing an Oculus device to have a Facebook account.
And to be clear on your GDPR component: You can mandate the consent, but only on purchase and first setup. It's not a violation of the GDPR to req
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I wonder why EU doesn't move one this as a whole?
They are I think. ... Just at EU pace. You know when some bureaucratic goliaths move so slowly you're not sure if they're dead or alive? That's the EU. The GDPR specifically left enforcement mostly to national governments, but I don't think Germany moved on this due to the GDPR.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is another datapoint in a very large investigation into Facebook by the EU on the whole. But I wouldn't expect to see any kind of movement for half a year at the fastest, assuming they are in fact work
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Maybe you didn't understand precisely what I said:
- There's nothing in EU law, local laws, or the GDPR that prevents someone from requiring an account for a device. Such as an Apple ID for the iPhone.
- There are some local laws regarding requiring an account *through a 3rd party* (and Oculus is a legally distinct entity from Facebook) such as in Germany.
- The GDPR prevents mandating accounts not directly tied with product purchases (i.e. you can't happily let customers use a product for a long time and then
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Don't buy this shit!
Last year I was accused of shilling for Facebook because of sharing my love for VR and how awesome I find the Rift S. I haven't supported them for even a moment since they announced that Oculus accounts will no longer be separate from Facebook accounts.
I *was* excited about next gen headsets. Now I am excited to look at WMR: HP Reverb G2 seems to be an excellent contender for the future of PCVR. The only sad thing is for standalone VR Oculus remains the only game in town.
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Recently bought a Valve Index, and just read this summary.
Sorry, but what the actual fuck? There are VR headsets that require you to let Facebook authorise your use of it? Why would anyone want that? Why would you want a VR headset that Facebook can control at their whim?
Paperweight? (Score:4)
Paperweight for what? A newspaper?
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Kindleweight for newskindles? What?
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Return to retailer does not work, demand money back and you deserve all the bullshit that it entails for being dumb enough to buy hardware, that requires you to register your details. Think, drop Facebook and they kill your hardware, that your 'RENTED' and must continue to pay rent, with your privacy. I have to say, you dumb fuckers, what were you expecting.
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being dumb enough to buy hardware, that requires you to register your details.
I sincerely hope you posted that stupidity from your smartphone.
Monopoly (Score:2)
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What did they expect would happen when they sold out to FB?
I'm not defending Facebook here, but this is how capitalism works. If someone comes along with a buyout offer and you would rather have the money than continued ownership of your company, that's just good old American business.
Some people are just in it for the money, not because they want to see their ideas change the world. Does that make them sellouts? Yeah, but can you really blame them? That mansion and $70k Tesla aren't going to buy themselves...
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It used to be you bought something and it didn't really matter what happened to the company afterward, you could still use the product.
Now, you buy a product and the company can arbitrarily at any time degrade it or stop it from working.
Re: Monopoly (Score:3)
Just wait until Facebook ARia glasses come out, and Facebook starts doing wholesale face-recognition and geotracking of everyone within camera-gaze of a wearer.
If you thought the public backlash against Google Glass was severe, just WAIT until Facebook makes Google look like rank amateurs who still semi-try to convince themselves they're (mostly) non-evil. ARia's likely nonstop facial-recognition is a dystopian Stasi-like social-credit tracking-nightmare just WAITING to happen unless the US & EU (among
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In what way is there a monopoly going on here? If anything, this product is at a disadvantage from being owned by Facebook. It's similar to how a lot of Sony A/V equipment suffers not because they can't make great gear, but because their corporate siblings in the record and movie industries have the internal pull to ruin them.
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fb isn't a monopoly, much less when it comes to vr. any vr buyer doing the slightest research had to know about this, and would have avoided these jerks.
if not, then they're either clueless or ok with these shenanigans, nothing whatsoever to do with monopolistic practices. yet.
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What did they expect would happen when they sold out to FB?
Fortunes that would shame the kings of Old Arabia.
Which they got. You can't shake the Devil's hand and then ghost him after the check clears.
...facepalm..... (Score:2)
Just trust Facebook (Score:2)
You might have looked at disinformation in VR. Be happy that your now non-functional VR headset doesn't show you disinformation.
Your Money and Your Life (Score:2)
Re:Your Money and Your Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Most non-slashdot people already have a facebook account. Nobody cares about privacy.
Losing 5% of sales to miscreants that are not on facebook is a small price to pay for knowing everything there is to know about your customers.
Welcome to 2020.
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sad but true. how is this modded flamebait?
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Because Slashdot needs more moderation options? I'm guessing aberglas' comment would fall in the "Enraging but true" category.
Buy (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some games and web sites that have optional facebook or google log in. If they ever dump their native login and require one of those, I'm gone.
Are you buying? Or paying to be bought and sold to advertisers?
Why you need to be on (((speech jail & control (Score:1)
... to use their VR?
I think multiple accounts isn't actually allowed then again who in their right mind want to link it to an account they actually use?
Also of course in my case the first one is already suspended since long =P
Re:Why you need to be on (((speech jail & cont (Score:5, Insightful)
Also of course in my case the first one is already suspended since long =P
This is where I'm at. I lost my account years ago. As far as I can tell, there is basically no recourse to get it back. It just isn't in their business model to have a human review account issues.
This was perfectly fine back when you were losing access to a free website, but now people are going to be losing access to a physical product that they bought. I'm sure the TOS will have enough legalese to protect them, but I wonder if the bad PR will force them to improve their user support. Cynic in me says probably not, they'll figure that the few extra sales they get won't justify the cost, and bad press doesn't seem to hurt them much.
Either way I don't really care. Any interest I had in Oculus died when Facebook bought them.
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Welcome to election season, where sanity goes out the window in a desperate effort to stop the Russian troll farms. Just wait about three weeks, and all these problems will magically go away.
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As long as I can have a fresh account with that photo and no consequences then I'm fine with that.
They already have a photo for my old account though I refused to write my real first and last names as names for the account because I didn't wanted them.
just do an charge back and let them deal with the (Score:2)
just do an charge back and let them deal with the fallout
You aren't missing much (Score:5, Interesting)
My Quest 2 arrived yesterday. I'm massively underwhelmed by it.
1. Games purchased for Oculus Go can't be used on it. This is fucking STUPID. Go and Quest(2) all run Android. Quest(2)'s hardware is a literal superset of Go's hardware (with analog stick instead of thumb touchpad). Even if Go's games looked and ran no BETTER than they did on Go, making them not run AT ALL is just evil. It's obvious Oculus used Quest as an excuse to wipe the store slate clean of most indie content.
2. Oculus' Avatars are FUGLY. Zero "cuteness" factor whatsoever.
3. Most of its "best" games feel like forced manual labor. How many floating objects do you really want to squirt with a hose or clumsily grope at?
4. Most of its games are way more expensive than the amount of enjoyment you'll ever get out of them. Especially since Oculus will probably empty your games library every few years anyway. Throw-away ephemeral games are only WORTH a dollar or two. MAYBE $9.95 for one you'll play hours per day for a few weeks if it's truly SPECTACULAR.
5. Quest 2 (and Go) both leave me feeling "optically traumatized" in ways Google Cardboard (piss-poor as it was) never did. It's hard to describe, but one specific disturbing example happened AFTER I took it off... for about 5 minutes, things I looked at kept "de-fusing" and splitting apart into two diagonally-shifted images. It happens to me occasionally late at night (like, 4am) when my eyes are totally fried... but it was only 10pm, after about an hour of Quest 2 use. Like I said, I can't quite put my finger on the problem, but my eyes just felt REALLY "beaten up" afterwards. Quest 2 doesn't leave me feeling as QUEASY as Go & Cardboard, but in terms of "eyes feeling beaten-up afterwards", I'd say it's as bad as the Go, and substantially WORSE than a painstakingly-tweaked Android Cardboard (with the caveat that very,very few "Cardboard" systems WERE painstakingly calibrated).
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for about 5 minutes, things I looked at kept "de-fusing" and splitting apart into two diagonally-shifted images.
Either your IPD is set incorrectly or you need correction lenses for your headset. With the Quest 2 being more customizable than its predecessor this should be fixable in ways that other headsets can't.
I'm massively underwhelmed by it.
But yeah to be hones I never understood the appeal of the Quest. I'm a total VR fanboi and love everything about it ... on the PC, with great games and high quality graphics. Half-Life: Alyx was a generation defining game for me, much like the first Half-Life was and Doom was before then. I just didn't see th
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I think the appeal is for people like me who are passively interested in VR, but don't have and are not interested enough to drop the kind of money you need to build a capable PC in addition to buying a more expensive headset.
One of the things that was keeping me from pulling the trigger is that gap of what I could do with a PC connected version vs something like the Quest. For someone not in the weeds of the VR scene, I found it frustratingly difficult to get a general feel for this. Then Facebook entered
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Yeah agreed. If you don't already have a gaming PC or a PS4 for PSVR then the outlay is rather huge.
Re: You aren't missing much (Score:2)
I've also noticed that the "in-focus" sweet spot "keyhole" is ABSURDLY small. Like, maybe 10 degrees wide when the headset is positioned PERFECTLY, and 3-5 degrees with ANY slippage AT ALL. I think the fresnel lens is a major part of the problem... I wish I could take out the fresnel lenses & replace them with proper aftermarket aspheric lenses. Putting "prescription" lenses behind a fresnel lens does nothing to enlarge a fresnel-lens keyhole.
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I wish I could take out the fresnel lenses & replace them with proper aftermarket aspheric lenses.
I think you're just saying that because you don't remember previous headsets. I'm not sure what you mean by "proper" aspheric lenses, but early headsets had traditional lenses and they were abandoned due to light physics issues, namely:
a) very thick and comparatively heavy.
b) longer focal length necessitating a larger (longer) headset
c) very narrow CA free angle (they may have been sharper over a wider angle, but they didn't actually look much better)
d) narrow field of view which worked in the DK1, but it's
Re: You aren't missing much (Score:2)
Rift's biggest problem was its inability to work with even high-end mobile-workstation laptops. Quadro card? Not on whitelist. Denied. Whitelisted card in external enclosure via Thunderbolt? Denied.
Even if Oculus couldn't officially support random laptop setups, they aggravated the situation by keeping the connection details mostly secret & under wraps. A good compromise would have been an open-source HAL, so someone determined to make a Rift work in an "unsupported" environment could have at LEAST trie
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Yeah Oculus have been quite dumb about hardware support. Hell NVIDIA releases fancy new consumer gaming GPU and suddenly early adopters find they don't meet the "minimum" hardware requirements and get locked out.
This official support whitelist bullshit is a truly dumb decision on behalf of what we're constantly told is smart people. But then these are the people who force firmware updates and provide zero mechanism to roll back either.
I'm happy Oculus put so much R&D into the technology. I'm happy for t
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The LAST Occulus (Score:2)
Quest 2 is the first Oculus headset...
... to require a Facebook account
Facebook has a hubris problem. This will kill Occulus. What a PR disaster, a technical piece of shyte decision, and trying to force people to sign in/up for FB.
Sorry, FB. Your purchase just lost millions in value.
E
Re: The LAST Occulus (Score:3)
Facebook clearly learned NOTHING from Google's "Google+" debacle.
If an Oculus user doesn't actively use Facebook, it isn't because he doesn't "know" about it... it's because he doesn't *trust* Facebook, or doesn't WANT to indiscriminately share mundane (yet potentially-harmful someday for an as-yet unknown reason) details about his life with everyone he's ever been shamed or pressured into adding as a 'friend' (knowing it only takes one bug or TOS-violating API client to wreck your carefully-curated friend
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I think the difference is that with Google+, the vast majority of its users only had an account to access other unrelated services. Much as I hate Facebook, they do have a fairly large pile of users that use Facebook for Facebook.
This move makes sense. It sucks, but it makes sense.
Why? (Score:2)
Would you even need a account for anything?
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To sell you games. Welcome to 2020. You don't get to buy a game without an account with someone. That said I wish I didn't need to use an Oculus account to play SteamVR games.
Makes Oculus unusable in a educational context (Score:1)
To make a Facebook account mandatory renders Oculus (Quest 2, but