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Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

oculus.com

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Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#941

Post by KaiserPro »

distances wrote: post #933
KaiserPro wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah thats not actually true. My mum has a shadow facebook account for a number of reasons. She only has one friend, its on a shadow email. It's still active after a good 6 months. it didn't require a phone number either. I mean it asked, but I didn't give it one. So long as the emails dont bounce, you're good.

> So long as the emails dont bounce, you're good. Simply not true. I suggest you try yourself and see how long the account stays unlocked.

> My mum has a shadow facebook account for a number of reasons. She only has one friend, its on a shadow email. It's still active after a good 6 months.

I mean I don't know how I can make it any clearer....

Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#943

Post by smolder »

ForHackernews wrote: post #446
ccktlmazeltov wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it such a big deal to create a fb account though? Can't you just use a fake name if you don't care about having a fb account?

In short, no. Facebook has gotten very good at catching and deleting "fake" accounts. Back in the day, I worked on an application that used Facebook's Graph API and I needed to create some bogus accounts for testing, but they were consistently blocked within days. Using some combination of behaviour analysis, flagging new and/or cookie-less browsers, and (I suspect) human review FB have gone to great lengths to try a…

That might be what they tell investors but I disagree that they've gotten good at policing accounts. I moderate a large Facebook group and we get flooded with join requests from obviously fake users all the time. Most of them have a handful of southeast Asia friends, some random highly geographically distributed friends in the English speaking world, and stock or stolen photos. The real giveaway is the programmatic nonsense responses they give to the membership questions. I've been reporting these accounts to Facebook a long time and they persist, often with join dates making them multiple years old.

Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#944

Post by wccrawford »

MattGaiser wrote: post #62
daenz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In hindsight, the downvotes from people with more real-world experience than me were definitely justified. I don't want to assume bad intent, but I find it hard to believe that someone could be so naive about the project and the organization controlling it.

To close the deal, I suspect that many assurances were offered by Facebook. Why do we assume that he lied instead of someone at Facebook?

I don't think any reasonable person thinks Luckey lied. They think he said something stupid, was called on it, and double-down.

Now that it has proven out as people expected, they're calling him out on it again. Perhaps other people will learn a lesson from it? I can hope.

Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#945

Post by [deleted] »

raxxorrax wrote: post #880
donkey-hotei wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work there. If "shadow profile" means a profile that's created from PII for a specific person that doesn't have an account on the site, fb doesn't create shadow profiles.

That you are that specific about P2 very clearly tells me that Facebook actually does create shadow profiles. I believe you that P2 isn't the basis of such profiles.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#946

Post by kukx »

shallowthought wrote: post #782
ashtonkem wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who say they can’t be bought are either saints (rare), or have never had a reasonable chance of being offered their price. Most humans will get very morally flexible once offered enough resources; this is precisely why we have contracts and courts, to create structural systems more capable of upholding agreements than individual humans can do alone.

Or have never been in a situation where their mother, father, or themself has a serious medical condition requiring over $1,000,000 and many years of fighting to treat it. "I can't be bought" is a failure of imagination.

It is a failure of imagination to think that everything can be bought. Many things do not have a monetary equivalent.

Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#947

Post by danlugo92 »

hansvm wrote: post #570
ccktlmazeltov wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it such a big deal to create a fb account though? Can't you just use a fake name if you don't care about having a fb account?

Last I tried (1-3yrs ago? don't quite remember), no. They needed a phone number, so I added a VOIP phone number and was informed that I needed a phone number tied to a real phone. I went out and bought a cheap phone so I could make the bloody account, and while I could make and receive calls just fine Facebook still treated it as if it weren't a "real" phone. Long story short, I never made that account, I briefly enj…

You can get IDless SIM cards overseas still. E.g. Colombia.

They probably don't have the infra set up (yet) to detect they are such SIM cards.

Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#949

Post by pornel »

Lycake wrote: post #852
pornel wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oculus has an app store, and Quest is a standalone device (mobile phone hardware on your face). It's understandable to need an account for these things, but of course this being an FB account is creepy.

I can understand the store aspect (even though in a perfect world you could buy apps and games without DRM and having to log in), but why would you need an account because something is a standalone device? What's the difference if there is a cable attached?

Quest is not a screen. It's a computer with a built-in screen. iMac for your face. Quest with a link cable is still not a screen, but a computer running a kind of "remote desktop" software.

The computer part needs an account. Virtually all software for it is paid, and it is genuinely helpful for non-technical users to have a "cloud" account that ensures they won't lose their games even if they sell or break the device.

Re: Facebook account now required to login to Oculus devices

#950

Post by baby »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #823
baby wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: do you really think that someone who is enthusiastic about VR would refuse to get the best headset out there because they would have to create an account on some service online? I can’t fathom how that would stop anyone who is truly interested about playing VR. It’s like telling someone they will need a PS account to play the playstation or a Xbox account to play the xbox, they’d probably be fine wi…

So, just to understand what you say correctly, I will ask: Do you think it is ethically tenable to require these VR interested, enthusiastic people to sign up to FB (known to be privacy nightmare), so that they are able to use the product they spent lots of money on? Is it acceptable to force them to do this, just because they are sufficiently interested in VR? Is it in general OK to force people to connect with a th…

I think it's fine yeah, I think it's fair to recognize that Facebook has had some privacy issues, but 1) it doesn't mean that it'll impact you if you just create a simple account and 2) it doesn't mean that FB will have more privacy issues in the future
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