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meta (Facebook) Buying Oculus and needing a Facebook account to use the device is a big reason why I bought an HTC Vive over any Oculus device. l to have a Facebook account, but it doesn’t see much use.
It’s not so much that I’m terribly concerned about my data – I actually live and work on the internet. My data is out there. But I like the polite fiction that a website or company won’t give that data away to someone who is willing to pay.
I mean, they absolutely will. That’s how it usually works. But the fiction is comforting. It’s kind of like how people refuse to use Facebook, but they do use Instagram.
So it’s a device hungry eye that caught the announcement that Meta will be rolling out Meta accounts in August. The new accounts are obliged; if Quest owners have been using a Facebook account or a merged Facebook/Oculus account, they should create a Meta account right away. Users who have used an Oculus account can continue to use it until January 2023.
Users migrating accounts must continue to have access to all their history and purchases, which is quite an issue. Delete your Facebook account before did you lose all your Oculus purchases.
So why change the way accounts work?
The change is happening, at least in part, because of a promise from then-Oculus boss Palmer Luckey. When Facebook originally purchased Oculus for $2 billion, Luckey took to Reddit to appease fans, promising Oculus owners would never need a facebook account Login.
A handful of months later, Facebook announced that it would require a Facebook account in the future. Although it was Luckey who made the pledge, he spoke on behalf of and with the support of Facebook.
People were quite angry about the betrayal. This whole move from needing a Facebook account to needing a Meta account seems to be (finally) trying to address that broken promise.
The move to a meta account is intended to reflect a shift from traditional social media to a more metaverse focused environment. But part of the new account creation process requires creating a Meta Horizon profile.
This is a social media profile and will appear in VR environments as well as elsewhere on the internet. The biggest change is that users can create multiple Meta accounts, instead of being limited to one account.
Of course, every new Meta account will have a Meta Horizon social media account as part of the process. That’s going to be great, but collecting and selling data.
After users set up a meta account, they can choose to associate a Facebook account with it. If users choose to link a Facebook or Instagram account, they can connect with friends and mutual partners to invite them to activities in VR.
But like I said. It’s the polite fiction I love. It’s a lot of social media hooks from the company that does Facebook. But until the Meta brand is as tarnished as the Facebook brand, I can live with it.
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