Facebook accounts will be mandatory for all Oculus VR headsets soon

People wanting to embark on a world of VR though he eyes of arguably the biggest headset developer Oculus, may be in for a big surprise as the company has announced that in order to make use of their VR goggles, a person will need to make use of their Facebook account to do so.

This has obviously agitated the Oculus community. Not only are there the obvious concerns around Facebook’s poor data privacy record which are most certainly not going to appeal to people, but with many companies and developers building apps for the system wanting to make use of Oculus for various purposes, tying the devices to a person’s personal Facebook page and not some form of corporate login process is neither ideal nor particularly secure for them.

On the Oculus subreddit, some users posted bitter memes about Farmville and data harvesting, while others swapped recommendations for other headsets. One user even posted a cartoon of Oculus as a sinking ship. Those are easily all exaggerations of what will likely happen, but with Facebook’s reputation being less than stellar, people are assuming the worst. Considering that Facebook owns Oculus, they would have the data whether you log in via Facebook or not.

It will be interesting to see how the Oculus community responds to this and If users and developers decide to move away from the device, exploring other competitors in this space. Or maybe Facebook will backtrack on this requirement and keep the Oculus login process separate. With Facebook already owning so much data, it could be argued that it doesn’t make much of a difference whether you let them know you have an Oculus or not, but I have a feeling that many in the community are not going to like this and rather look elsewhere instead.

Last Updated: August 21, 2020