There's a bit of a story behind this. Oculus is owned by Facebook, but the Facebook website and the Oculus headsets/software are by different teams working in different states. When Facebook bought Oculus, they decided to get rid of the Oculus-specific account system and use only Facebook accounts. The Facebook account requirement took effect with the launch of the Oculus Quest 2, which launched in October 2020.
October 2020 was the month before the US election, and the peak of both disinformation/influence campaigns, and of Facebook-the-website's efforts to combat those campaigns. So the spambot detector sensitivity was turned up to max that month, and if you tried to create a new account, there was a large chance you'd be mistaken for a bot and banned immediately. So a bunch of people who weren't Facebook users got fancy new VR headsets, tried to create Facebook accounts in order to be able to use them, and got immediately banned. The support department for Facebook-the-website was not at all up to the task of dealing with this. This kind of wrecked their product launch; instead of the press coverage and public reaction being about how great their hardware was, it was about all the people who couldn't use their hardware because of account issues.
So now Oculus has a completely separate support department for Facebook account issues, which acts less like it's supporting a free website and more like it's supporting a $300 piece of hardware. And if you have an account issue with the website, and you want to use that support department instead of the bad one, then buying a Quest 2 is not such a bad idea.
Just one point of clarification. We (the Oculus team) were based in Irvine, CA, but we were well under 100 people when we relocated to the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park in 2014. Organizational barriers came and went, but there wasn’t a meaningful physical barrier.
You ain’t kidding. Getting interviewed by an Oculus computer graphics software person who had never touched SSH in his life was quite an experience coming in as a potential production engineer circa 2015. And, on top of it, he was quite rude about it and held me responsible for not understanding anything I was saying even though he was basically interviewing a lumberjack or a fireman from his perspective, anything but a colleague.
Clearly a barrier that should have been there. He had no business being in the room and didn’t know how load balancing worked, even though he was asking me about it. Four strong hires and one no hire, which I know because the recruiter told me, so I could do the math. Also expressed no desire to fix it, so I sense it was an intentional move.
That was the last time I ever spoke to Facebook though I do appreciate the annual “hey, want to try again? for realsies this time?” email that tells me accept rate hasn’t recovered from the big crater I heard about. I’m glad it worked out the way it did but I wonder how many people got to experience that type of skillset mismatch as your orgs were merged.
GP said he was interviewing for Production Engineer which is the SRE/DevOps role in Facebook lingo. So, the issue there was having a CG software person interviewing someone for a completely different role.
From a career in professional VFX production (albeit software engineering side) - you'd be surprised...
As an example loading anything and everything, such as starting Maya, is done from the shell (different projects would have a myriad of different settings - usually stored in env vars), so picking up a few Linux skills can give your average artist some serious productivity (and hence career) gains. The work is often distributed globally - wanna check the state of something a bit non-standard in another site without transferring heaps of data over? There's a nice tool for that ;)
Side tangent, but ... thank you for Oculus. Seriously.
I recently got a Quest 2, and its been life changing. It's just an incredible product. I used a DK1 and DK2 back when they came out and the Quest 2 is like night and day. Everything is so much better. No screen door, wireless, plug and play, etc. I honestly didn't think VR would get to this point so quickly.
As for the life changing part, it's helping me work around some of my disabilities. Seems to be a common story in the VR space.
I know VR seems like a toy to many, but it really is changing people's lives. And I feel like modern VR started with Oculus.
Nobody is arguing that the Index isn't better (except for wireless-ness) but at 1/3 of the price, the Quest 2 is incredibly affordable and very, very nice.
And since you can play all the same PC VR games as the Index, plus Oculus-specific games, plus standalone Quest games... It's very versatile.
I have an OG Vive and just "upgraded" to the Quest 2 and it's hands-down better IMO.
I've upgraded my Quest 2 with some hand straps and the elite head strap, so that brings the price closer to 2/3 of the Index, and I still prefer it thanks to the standalone games and the wireless PC link. Not listening to the whine of the lighthouses is another small bonus.
> And since you can play all the same PC VR games as the Index, plus Oculus-specific games, plus standalone Quest games... It's very versatile.
Indeed. Because Valve values openness while Oculus (Facebook) values money. That's why Valve lets you play SteamVR games on Oculus, but Oculus does not let you play them on SteamVR (community solutions exist, of course).
It’s not evil at all. Do you see how accessible the price of this thing is? There is trade offs. Also, there is official support for playing your steam games (wirelessly) now, so you’re not correct on that.
I think they were trying to say that playing games from the Oculus store on a Valve Index or HTC Vive isn't possible, but playing games bought on Steam on a Quest 2 is possible.
It actually is one of the complaints I have about how Oculus does things, but since they basically ushered in this new era of VR, they pretty much had to have their own store and SDK. I can't fault them for not closing it, and nothing is stopping the developers from publishing on both.
You are describing all video game publishers, Nintendo, Microsoft, Epic, Sony. This is actually for indie developers, who can de-risk a project by taking the upfront money.
Why would I want to buy a second VR headset to play some games, when the one I have is already perfectly fine? Keep in mind that playing Oculus games on the Index works fine using third party software, it's Facebook trying to DRM the hardware.
Do you also expect me to buy a Disney TV to watch Disney movies and a Marvel TV to watch Marvel movies? Or do you expect that all games, or movies, use the hardware you already own?
Yes, technically, kinda. Aside from being much more expensive the Index is also not wireless (at least not without an add-on?) and requires a (beefy) PC.
Personally, if it weren't for the Facebook account requirement I'd probably opt for a Quest 2. As it is, I don't think VR is worth the investment of an Index to me so I'll stick with my second hand not-updated-since-before-Oct-2020 Rift because it is perfectly adequate for Beat Saber.
Oculus requires the exact same beefiness of your PC as Index. If you're happy using the Oculus on-board processing, you might as well use a laptop from 10 years ago as your PC, it will have the same quality.
If you actually want decent VR you need a beefy PC for both platforms. So that is a non-argument.
PC software for VR is not written to support 10 year old PCs and a 10 year old Laptop won't have the ports an Index needs. Oculus software is written to support the Snapdragon processor. So your post is not correct. It's not about which solution is more powerful, it's about what the software is targeting for minimum requirements.
Blaston is really awesome and I don't think they deserved the backlash they got when the ad debacle started, but I am happy they got through it.
BTW: if you are using your headset for exercise and want to give our open source VR fitness game a try you can check it out on AppLab https://quest.vrworkout.at
It's not a true game but an hand tracking based exercise game disguised as a bit of a game
That’s funny, it’s just too late for me. I just returned two Quest 2s because we couldn’t create Facebook accounts. Ironic. I’ve spent years not even wanting one, and when I do, it was impossible.
I pay for a cold calling service that lets me look up emails and phone numbers for many professionals of import. These days customer service gets two shots to get it right before I start calling the personal cell phone numbers of the C-suite, board of directors and everyone with the word director in their title. I'm absolutely over shitty customer service and it's not fair to subject customer service representatives to well deserved vitriol. Well paid execs getting the big bucks and making the decisions to under-invest in customer service and driving down defects? Fair game.
With the last company whose customer service messed up badly, I reached out to the head of e-commerce for the company. I was nice and pleasant and explained the dilemma, but then he tried to pass the buck back to support which did not have the resources to solve the problem to which I replied "You're the head of e-commerce for company X, the buck stops with you. This is your problem to resolve. If you don't take ownership, I'm perfectly capable of escalating this issue myself, first to A, your CEO (personal cell number (xxx) xxx-xxxx and personal email foo@bar.com), then to B (...), C (...), or D (...) on the board of directors, then E, the CEO of the company that owns your company (...), and then F, who is on his board of directors (...) and happens to live 2 miles from me.".
...boom, problem resolved immediately. Not just for me but for other customers. Changes were made to their website within days. When warranted, you just have to go absolutely nuclear and make it clear as day that solving your problem personally is far cheaper than you escalating the the issue to anyone and everyone with power at the company whose customer service is jerking you around.
You have to make the cost of not providing customer service well the first time around so expensive that they don't see any other option than to invest in doing things right the first time.
This is a recognised and effective method after standard approaches have been exausted. It goes by selveral names, though "email executive carpet bomb" is one colourful and memorable term associated with it.
I've used this a few times myself. Again, after going through normal channels.
The mode where multiple executives are contacted (and perhaps a member or two of the press CC'd) is particularly effective as it plays off both internal office politics and the bad public relations spillover dynamic.
Remember too that such approaches aren't entirely self-serving. If you are having a specific issue, it's quite likely that many others are as well.
Seriously. My whole thought reading GP's post was "This person is coming across as a complete asshole by their own words, but in their mind they are thinking they are coming across as some kind of hero."
I don't know. He's taking it to the actual people responsible, rather than taking it out on call center employees who are understaffed, overworked and powerless to change anything.
It's a brutal power move, but it targets the people actually responsible and it clearly gets results. I think this is way better for everybody involved.
Of course it does depend on the person escalating being correct about the issue, and good and reasonable about explaining it to the person in charge. And we all know that's not going to be true for your average customer. So use this power with discretion.
I see no issues with anyone being an asshole once others have driven them to that point. Should people continue to accept abuse and suffering from those who indifferently inflict it?
I agree with this as far as dealing with corporations goes. Somehow society internalized that whatever corporations do wrong is a "corporation's fault", but whatever bad happens to a corporation is a wrongdoing towards the employees.
Corporations are conscience-lacking psychopaths, faceless cowards and abusers, and should be treated as such. They are cowards because they hide behind false appearances - the go-to method of dealing with their own shortcomings. And they are smart about it.
This point is beatifully driven home in a futuristic science-fiction novel "Accelerando" (which is free btw) where corporations based on smart contracts and AI threaten sentient beings uploaded into the net by publishing altered derivatives of public works to reposess unsuspecting readers's minds using copyright law.
I mean, seriously... wasting the time, patience and goodwill of your paying customers by under-investing in quality customer support and driving down defects??
I know it's popular to diss the "karens" of the world, but a lot of them keep in check businesses that will abuse their customers if they can get away with it. They can be a useful corrective force just like class action lawsuits can be.
A little tin foil hat but I can imagine shitty company engaging marketing companies to spread the Karen meme. It seems like anyone who tries to get proper customer service these days is cancelled with “don’t be a karen” and “#BeKind” (Nb neither of these apply to the companies of course, just customers :-))
I think the difference between a Karen and someone who simply wants adequate customer service is that the Karen will tend to abuse people who a) lack the power to help as they're too far down the corporate ladder and b) will lose their livelihoods if they shout back, making it an unsporting thing to do. You're a Karen if you shriek and stamp your feet at a teenage fast food employee over chips that are too salty, you're not a Karen if you calmly but firmly escalate things to people who do have the power to solve your problem. It's the power dynamic that makes one a Karen, "punching down" is a Karenish move while "punching up" is often fair enough in my opinion.
Please stop using a very common name as a derogative! It's insulting to the women who have that name. Also, as you noticed, there is no male version of it. It's a decidedly sexist meme that shouldn't be promoted.
Oh hardly, using a sterotypical name is a very common comedic device. Tarquin and Julian are out-of-touch upper class people who probably go on illegal fox hunts, Karen gets unreasonably angry over petty things at low-level customer service people who can't argue back, Doris insists on driving at 25 mph in a 60 while her husband Bernard shouts at passing children for sport. Kevin is roughly the male equivalent of Karen, while Chad is a world-reknowned cad. Billy No Mates is famous for being alone, while Johnny Foreigner occasionally struggles with idioms.
Joe Public of course is usually well aware of this usage and doesn't actually think all people with these names are the sterotype they represent.
>using a sterotypical name is a very common comedic device
It is, and most of these memes keep some of the levity of their comedian origins. This particular meme seems unusually nasty and serious in comparison, but maybe it's just because it hurts someone close to me.
I think it's particularly vitriolic because it represents a deeper social issue, the bullying of underpaid customer service employees who lose their jobs if they defend themselves. The people who suffer most from "Karenish" behaviour can't call an entitled, bullying shitehawk what they are in person so it comes out as a meme. "Doris's" sluggish driving or "Tarquin's" excessive privately-educated mannerisms are merely annoying, while "Karen's" screaming and shouting at people who can't call them out is something worse.
I suppose that doesn't change the fact it's a bit crappy for all the perfectly decent people called Karen out there. While I think this behaviour does need a good snarl word to call it out when it happens, perhaps "Karen" isn't it and we can do better.
I’ve run support teams, even ones that are well taken care of, and there is no situation where your approach doesn’t hurt the support team and teach the executive nothing.
I’m happy to go into more detail, and/or offer advice on better approaches if you sincerely want it.
I'm all ears (sincerely), but any solution you offer needs to be effective at resolving the problems a company has created for me. I'm also happy to try other less-nuclear options first before I bust out the big guns. As I said, I don't start with this approach. In fact, I resorted to it out of necessity as the clerical mistake of one fortune 500 company was going to personally cost me more than $275k over 30 years. I spent several months and dozens of hours trying to resolve the issue. That one company burnt out all the patience I had for a lifetime. Necessity was the mother of this invention.
I give companies a fair chance to do things right. I said two shots, but my actual heuristic is when a problem starts costing me 4 figures if I were billing for my time instead. Usually that's about two significantly frustrating customer service interactions with long wait times.
Just today I had to call customer service for an airline and the wait times were over 4 hours! I ended up getting around the wait time by calling their customer support number in another language I speak and being able to resolve the problem without hassle. But there is no planet where 4 hours wait times are acceptable and I feel bad for those whose only option was to call their English-only customer support number.
Ultimately what I'm going to suggest comes down to philosophy, so if it doesn't align w/ your approach/needs I get it.
A theme of how you describe your interactions was to throw the support team under the bus, and/or highlight their failures to help you when interacting with an executive.
It's my experience that the executive has made intentional choices to deflect customer issues and that support team is their doing one way or another. Complaining about the support team to an executive will just put more pressure on the support team without granting them further support.
I'll get to a point in a minute :)
Another theme I see is one of using the system to your advantage. I have a fun similar airport story.
I knew my flight would get cancelled (weather) and I was about six hours early to the airport. I knew United had a partnership w/ Air Canada and the United staff wouldn't help me / the line was way too long because other flights already got cancelled. I went to the Air Canada desk and asked them to help since they had access to the same booking system. They told me to talk w/ United. While waiting in line again at United I called United on the phone and explained the situation and they immediately booked me an alternate flight on Air Canada that was direct to my destination, instead of through the one with bad weather. They also let me know that the Toronto airport I was in had a notorious rivalry between the staff of United and Air Canada where they constantly defer to the other team, supposedly because of spite.
So, my system.
Always take advantage of the system (non-human parts) - hit zero on the phone, try extensions if you dare.
My main approach when dealing with entry-level support people is to understand they have limited tools and their job is often to read a script that tries to get you to agree they helped. It's OK to deviate from that script, and if they can't help to ask to speak with a supervisor who can potentially offer a better option. When you move up the chain, it's important not to step on people on the way up. If they can't help you and you need to go around them by digging up the CEO via a cold call - I also think that's OK, but at that point you should be able to get what you want without throwing the failed support agent under the bus. If you want to give the executive advice, let them know that the support team seemed about as helpful as they could, but they didn't seem to have the training or support to offer you a fast resolution. Directly ask the executive to spend more time and effort investing in their support team and thinking of ways to offer improved support to avoid folks having to try to work around them. This frames it as a problem for the CEO to address with investment specifically, not one where they can just assume the support team did poorly and then go yell at a manager to improve morale with more beatings.
Anyways, always punch up is my rule. A second rule is to be deferential and try to take the blame for why you aren't getting what you want. This works exceptionally well at building empathy with support folks.
At one point in my life I missed about 50% of my flights, every time I'd be in line behind someone who complained about how slow security was, or the bag check, and they'd just get shut down. Every time I just asked if there was anything they could do to help me out given how absent minded I was for arriving late and not being prepared and I usually got the next flight out for free.
Anyways, punch up, use the system to your advantage, but don't direct your ire towards support teams when they fail. Also, if they've done a bad job it sends a better signal to fill out those NPS/CSAT surveys you get after the support interaction with a low score. This stuff will make it to execs, and comments that are left are often read thoroughly.
> A theme of how you describe your interactions was to throw the support team under the bus, and/or highlight their failures to help you when interacting with an executive.
I left out a lot of details, which I know means that a lot of assumptions will necessarily be made. I think you're reading into my comment something I didn't do. To give more details on the interaction. There was no phone support, only email and support took almost 2 weeks to response to my dilemma, which exceeded the response time expected by US Customs and the stuff I purchased was returned. They didn't respond to 3 additional requests within that two week period. When they finally responded, they couldn't solve the problem. The only real failure of the support team was that they were grossly understaffed. There's no reason for two week wait times, especially for a customer that just placed an order for multiple thousands of dollars which they charged the customer for when it was shipped, not delivered.
When I reached out to the executive to explain the problem. They only fault I gave to support was stating that they must be grossly understaffed if the response times were as long as they were. In my message, I placed the responsibility for fixing that particular issue of understaffing on the executive in question (head of ecommerce). Other issues that needed attention was how they were handling international fulfillment was causing them defects and costing them probably $100 or more per defect on shipments to the United States. I had already reached out to the partner company they worked with and was in contact with that company's United States CEO. Together we figured out the issue and I was relaying the fixes to the head of ecommerce for the company so he could fix the problem at the root because the buck stopped with him. I was solving a very real problem for them that was costing them money and I did all the research into the fix and provided the person who was ultimately responsible with fixes. I did this because I was trying to fix the problem myself during those two weeks before US customs sent my order back.
Passing the buck when it's your job and a customer has figured out the problem and handed you the solution on a silver platter is highly unprofessional.
Regarding your recomendation to use the system. It's a good one and one I'm familiar with. I use it often, but in my original example above I did not because the system in question had no interfaces to interact with besides a support email. There was no phone system, no chat system, not brick and mortar store, no support agents, etc. It was a system with a single interface that provided no interactivity (I can't dial 0 or ask to speak with the right person). The only interfaces available were that email address, US Customs and the shipping company.
Has there been interfaces that could be probed and exploited to solve the problem, yes, I totally agree with your approach.
I owe you a longer response which might not happen, but appreciate you engaging and I acknowledge I made assumptions based on the context that sound like they were wrong - apologies for that.
I think we are on the same page and I hope if you ever run into a problem with a support team I’m close to that you let me know ASAP :)
Not the person you're replying to, but I'd be interested in suggestions - I've in the past had some horrendous support experiences.
Also my feeling on reading the grandparent comment is that they don't care about improving the support structure of the company, but rather find that bothering a C-level is the fastest way to get somebody important to send a "just get this sorted so this person stops bothering me" e-mail & have their support issue resolved - which I have to say I'm sympathetic to... whatever works for a customer to get their issue resolved, they have no interest in helping or hurting the support team.
Actually, When I reach out to executives, I'm often trying to get the problem permanently fixed. In the instance I cited above, I knew I wasn't the only person that had this problem as I had found complaints on forums of other customers with the same problem that I shared with them. I also did additional research into why the problem happened and provided concrete actionable steps that this executive was best positioned to enact. I was trying to solve it for me and trying to solve it for others by actually contacting the person that had the power to fix it. It was when they tried to pass the buck back to customer support so "they could wash their hands of the problem" that I raised the stakes by demonstrating that I had the will and wherewithal to escalate the issue as far as it needed to go. They eventually implemented a hot fix for the problem. There's still no permanent solution implemented, but at least no other customers are wasting their time and they aren't wasting their money either (as the problem was burning money by shipping goods from Europe to the United States, where US Customs was rejecting the stuff and returning it back to them).
Ah, sorry I misinterpreted what you wrote then. Hopefully the commenter will see this and reply, although I assume enough time has passed that they've forgotten about it!
Nah I saw it and have been busy and agree with you that context is hard on the internet and I got it wrong with the best intentions, glad we could talk it out :)
Reports of their death are as usual overstated. Even looking at the steam hardware survey shows this, with quest 2s eating up almost all the market share.
I disagree. I bought a Rift S before Facebook spit out their new requirements. I really had doubts as to what the ownership of Facebook would mean, but I was naive enough to still buy it.
I don't even care about the money so I won't sell it and probably will just throw it away. This killed this VR generation for me.
Technically it is awesome, would recommend everyone to try it at some point. But maybe spend a bit more for Valve or other hardware. There is lock-in too, but they don't make money with user data and have the superior environment.
The Quest series makes the cables go away and that is a big plus. While you can use the Steam VR while the Oculus environment is open, you will never get rid of the Facebook baggage. Hardware is indeed great, but hardware isn't everything.
At least someone has finally come up with a business model to bring about widespread adoption of VR. The next stage will be to force buyers to actually use VR: occulus/facebook support only availible through the headaet. The final stage will be to randomly changing facebook passwords of anyone who doesnt currenlty have an occulus 4 on thier head.
Unfortunately, Facebook heavily subsidizes the cost of the Quest 2, while Index and Reverb G2 have to be sold at a profit.
Facebook is also deep in bed with Qualcomm making Quest 2 work fully standalone and getting the XR2 SOC at a steep discount. Index and Reverb G2 require desktop PCs and high-end GPUs, and other companies using the same Qualcomm SOC have to pay full price.
Given the headline FB users buying Oculus VR headsets to get customer service prioritization, the parent post is accusing FB of abusing their market position in social networking (by having an intentionally over-eager ban hammer coupled with intentionally poor remediation for it) in order to sell more Oculus headsets (as owning an Oculus gets you access to a better support channel).
FB had an internal help system called "Oops". It was meant for employees to get help for friends they knew in real life. It was discontinued not long ago (EDIT: maybe not according to a child comment). There were just too many requests for help.
Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive (Mark, Sheryl) supports it. Even if it affects the bottom line - and there were plenty of examples where large customers could not spend significantly more money with Facebook because of software bugs - they won't do anything about it.
That was literally the only way I got help after someone somehow managed to registered one of my email address under a Facebook account I don't control and tried to impersonate me. I don't even know how that was possible since FB does email verification. I tried the normal help system but got nowhere so I reached out to my friends who work at FB. One of them used the internal help system it was resolved within a couple of days. A mutual friend of ours joked that I was really using my "tech privileges" and he was absolutely right. I would have had to deal with a FB account pretending to be me for a while if not for the fact that I live in Silicon Vally and have a lot of friends who work for FB. It really shouldn't have been how that matter was resolved.
Any new account can use Facebook for 24 hours before email verification becomes required. This is a huge issue for any email address not linked to a Facebook account. Facebook will happily leak the social graph of that address's shadow profile (e.g. in the "suggested friends" list), and let anyone impersonate it, for 24h.
Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email. The worst was probably the time I got emailed an excel sheet containing the names, personal details, and logins for an entire layer of middle managers for a small banking chain.
> Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email
First initial and last name it even worse. John, Jonathan, Julie, Jacob, James,and more all start with "J." I've gotten rental agreements, investment reports, appearance contracts, song demos, family pictures (not my family), and more.
At my second job, there was quite a commotion in the office one week, when my boss started receiving a steady stream of random people's CVs. It turned us a moment to figure out what's going on - turns out, there was an ad for seasonal fruit-picking work, which listed [lastname].[firstname]@gmail as the contact address; my boss had a [firstname][lastname]@gmail address, and a subset of wannabe fruit pickers were reversing address components for some reason (with the dot conveniently being an ignored character in GMail).
Don't remind me. I spent forever trying to figure out why I was still being charged for an Xbox account I'd already canceled. Turns out Microsoft had one account with the dot and one without.
> Having a firstnamelastname address will subject you to a truly baffling level of false accounts and misaddressed email
You're so right.
This is a big reason I'm looking forward to Apple's iCloud+ custom domain names. Outlook.com already supports custom domain names for paying customers in a very limited way, but hopefully Apple's move will light a fire under Gmail product management to offer this, perhaps through Google One.
Google's support for custom domains is strictly for Workspace (formerly GSuite) customers. It's analogous to Microsoft 365 business plans[1].
Other providers are moving beyond this, i.e. offering custom domains to a wider set of (paying) users. Outlook.com already supports this in a limited way (domain must be with GoDaddy, kind of silly), for Microsoft 365 Family and Individual users. And Apple is apparently going to offer it to everyone as part of iCloud+ too.
Not everyone needs the full Workspace offering. In fact Google has Google One for exactly that kind of customer, and a custom domain name would fit neatly into the Google One proposition.
I received a 1500€ quote for urinals and "bio boxes" (?) in Belgium just yesterday. Two weeks ago I received a boarding pass for the next day for a Spanish island. I think the worst is that since I share the same name, I imagine I could have used the boarding pass.
I seem to share a name with a beef farmer in Australia. I get regular emails about prime Aberdeen Angus sperm I can buy, and once I even got sent details of his farm financing with an Australian bank.
Apparently Virgin Mobile doesn't verify email addresses nor does it let you reset your password by email. I assume they send you a text or something. So I've been getting billing notifications and other garbage for someone else's account for years.
My email address is temporal at gmail.com. "Temporal" was my teenage gamer tag. It also turns out to mean "temporary" in Spanish. Ever since the Spanish-speaking world started using gmail, people have been signing up for stuff with my e-mail address every single day. Any new service I want to register an account with, I first have to hijack the existing account holding my address and delete it or change the email address.
But it gets worse!
Someone working at AT&T Mexico apparently decided to start entering my address as a placeholder when signing up customers that didn't have one. So I started getting phone bills -- with complete call histories -- for people all over Mexico. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact AT&T, I set up a filter to delete them.
Once a Spanish telecom did even worse, and populated seemingly their entire database with my address, so I'd get hundreds of phone bills all at once on the first of the month. I think they fixed it after two billing cycles.
Once a school in Chile made me an admin of their paid Zoom organization. I was actually unable to remove myself from their org or change the account's address, meaning I basically couldn't use Zoom until they removed me. (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.)
If you run a web service, PLEASE VERIFY ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES.
PS. Just now as I write this, someone in Spain scheduled an appointment for car service using my address. The e-mail contained a link to cancel the service, which I clicked. Oops.
I got a common Hispanic name a my address is (nane first letter)surname at Gmail
I receive a lot of information from many people from Patagonia to Toronto, and there are systems that I CANNOT BELIEVE what they send without confirming the account.
Worst offender, by far, is Chilean companies. Total disregard of privacy practices. Almost none from Spain (GPDR effects I guess)
> (I'm unsure whether the school fixed it or Zoom fixed it after I made an angry tweet that went viral; whoever fixed it never bothered to follow up with me.)
If it was someone at Zoom: getting past the company's lawyers and PR people might have been too much of a barrier to bother.
It can be an attack vector, to scan for placeholder addresses and register them and start receiving email with valuable information. For example something like navy-recruiting@donotreply.com.
Not exactly the same, but some time ago some woman from Texas changed her email on Netflix to mine, seemingly without confirmation.
My email address has a very particular custom domain that can't be explained with a typo, and I don't know anyone in Texas. Very weird. Netflix support was like, whatever, why do you care?
A few years ago my dad got an email saying he'd bought something on Amazon, using an account none of us had created. Turned out someone used his email address to make a purchase. We reset the password and logged in. It looked like a legit purchase and seemed plausible, based on the person's name (we saw the shipping location), that it could have been a mistake.
I doubt it. What if it's a typo? There are at least 3 people who I get emails (and bank statements) for in my first.last@gmail.com address, and from what I can tell it's because they dropped the middle initial when signing up or the person mailing them did it manually and messed it up.
And because Gmail treats that dot differently else I have some interesting cases like where I have 2 Instagram accounts under my email, one with it and one without, and it's not always clear which one the email is for until I expand the details. I have been tempted to log in and shut these down, but I'm pretty sure that is illegal. However some sites require me to log in to unsubscribe or contact support so into the spam they go.
> tempted to log in and shut these down, but I'm pretty sure that is illegal
Ehh. Intent matters a lot. I'm not saying someone couldn't go after you, but as long as you weren't actively trying to make off with their data or impersonate them I think you'd be in the clear.
Imagine you got such an email and were confused. So you went to log in but couldn't. So you reset the password in confusion. That's not illegal, it's a very reasonable response to being notified of an account that you don't remember creating. If contacting the service provider fails, closing the account would seem to be the only remaining reasonable course of action. It's not your fault the service provider doesn't verify things.
I highly highly recommend against doing this!!!! By doing a password recovery you are on the hook for any illegitimate content that the person might have uploaded/shared and might get you in real legal trouble. Instead I recommend filing a complaint without claiming the account.
No, you aren't. Certainly someone might try to claim that it had been you. Worst case I suppose you could actually end up in court but that's true for pretty much any accusation.
I doubt it would be an issue in practice though. Far more likely is that you might inadvertently get caught up in a ban from the service due to the illicit content being linked to the account you recovered which would now be linked back to your metadata (IP address & etc) since you recovered it which would in turn link to your regular account.
I thought all the emails were spam, until one day I realized they seemed pretty legit. I went to FB directly, forgot password, and had to use Google translate until I could switch the interface to English. I tried to delete the account, but got locked out. It took a lot of effort to get FB to delete that account.
Can confirm. We were a corporate account spending large 6 digit sums every month on Facebook Business Manager and Facebook randomly stopped campaigns due to intransparent and inaccessible credit line configurations, hurting not just our bottom line but theirs as well, with nobody to turn to in general FBM support.
After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask).
Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month.
But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.
Honestly, I don't think they've cared about users for a long-long time. And I think their lack of user support will be their downfall. It may take a while but someone will figure out a way to get tractions on their markets and when they do, Google and Facebook are screwed.
Amazon, on the other hand have amazing customer support so much so that even if you think the company is terrible on a moral level you probably still suggest it to friends.
It used to be you could get some level of technical support if you were an advertiser, but that is no longer the case. Perhaps if you are spending tens of millions on Facebook Ads per year, but otherwise the only support you get is a revolving door of advertising support specialists that try to convince you to use whatever advertising product is best for Facebook at the moment.
I have seen company Facebook pages automatically deleted by an algorithm with no warning and vague reasoning that there are other similar pages. There is almost zero support to help and what support is there is unable to do anything.
I need not tell this forum, but if you have a company, do not rely on Facebook as your business page. Take the time to setup a proper website and use Facebook for promotion if you must.
If you are a user of the Facebook platform I wouldn’t ever put my money into the platform in any way.
I'm sure detractors would find plenty to criticise about a system to prioritise friends and family, but it's smart from a QA perspective. They get a corpus of issues that are falling through the cracks, coming from real people without an agenda.
While that’s useful, I suspect the real reason it exists is to discourage fix-it-yourself options, where an engineer may access sensitive user info to help a friend.
Or just keep employees on track. Imagine a company the size of FB having a barrage of Slack messages over family and friends with suspended accounts, trying to find who manages which DB.
My cynical take is that its really just there so there's less incentive for people at Facebook to push for actually functional general customer support, because Facebook would rather just ignore issues than spend money to make the user experience better.
Yes, every ticket on Oops that's found to be actionable should result in a postmortem about why the regular security & customer support channels failed.
A few of those and you'd get a mostly functioning system.
I'm glad people are helped. Something is better than nothing.
I also think that, a service that is focused on helping those with personal connections to Facebook employees dampens the most potent source of visible friction for the maintainers of a system that clearly has the potential to be arbitrary and oppressive.
I think we would all be better off in a world where each oops case was solved by changing the overall system - even if we also recognize that change on that scale is difficult for then the most well intentioned.
It makes me incredibly angry that I have a long-standing issue that I can basically get no support or fix for whilst you are cheering a cordoned-off system on as ‘working amazingly well’.
Yeah, from my time working at FB, it's basically a customer support queue that actually gets reviewed. Sometimes, there can be some additional discussion between the person looking at the ticket and the employee who reported it, so that clarifications can be made when needed. From what I saw, it's mostly used for account recovery, but sometimes used for bug reporting. FWIW, Yahoo had a similar escalation path while I was there (that seems to still exist).
This is a way to help friends and family get their accounts fixed, and also to help make sure employees don't look at their friend and family's accounts with internal tools.
> Facebook has a corporate structure that simply will not prioritize any effort longer than 6 months unless a senior company executive
To be fair, many companies have some degree of this. They don't want to commit significant resources to something the people in charge don't understand.
A lot of it seems to also be around review cycles. My company has quarterly goal reviewing.
One of the nice thing about my time in government was that there were no review cycles, just a project to be done. Granted, there were many other problems and we cut corners to meet artificial (and in the end irrelevant) deadlines imposed from above, but the central project never got derailed.
The 6 month priorities are due to PSC, Facebook's performance review cycle. Work that took more than a half effectively doesn't count for bonuses or promotions and could possibly get you fired, so it's disincentivized.
As of 2022, PSC is shifting to every 12 months not 6 in an effort to better support longer-term projects and thinking. Promotions will still be assessed every 6 months.
FB policy says they want to reward results and not effort. But it makes it hard to reward people for making progress on things that can't be done in 6 months.
It also makes for shitty service quality around the end of June and December, as people rush to push things to prod. (I've heard this may have changed, but it's hard to notice good service quality).
I would be quite curious what would be possible at some companies if things could be considered beyond 3-6 months or if you could even keep the same team for that period.
I’m intrigued at all the stuff that falls off the wagon just because it isn’t a three month initiative or would need to cross a quarter to be done.
This is disturbingly similar to how criminal enterprises operate, without regard for operational expenses, alienating customers.
It is like nobody care much about losing easy money.
I haven’t worked for a company that didn’t leave easy money on the table or waste money because of disorganization, except for the government which just wouldn’t spend any money except employee time.
Utility services start off as luxuries, and are private and unregulated. This was true with telephone and electric companies. When these services get to a certain point where there are real consequences for not being able to access the system, they need to have public regulation to ensure access and customer service. ISP internet service has definitely reached this point, and I think that there's a strong argument that Google & FB accounts (particularly for businesses) have reached this point as well.
I hate FB and Google, but I don’t buy this argument. It doesn’t pass the duck test for me — doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view.
I am sympathetic to the argument though. Getting locked out of your existing Gmail account could be really disastrous. Maybe there should be regulation for email extrication — if you’re going to ban me, you better allow me to update all of my accounts to not use your email service first.
Email absolutely should be a utility and allow you to transfer your email address between providers just like you can your phone number. I understand the technical challenges associated with that due to how DNS and the email protocols work, but I don't particularly care. There should also be a legally required minimal level of customer support for email account issues - if I can't get access to my email for over a week because of an issue on their end or even on mine, there better be a support rep ready to talk to me over the phone and get it sorted.
For all of the things that could ruin me if lost/stolen (government ID, bank accounts, phone number...), I have an automatic last-resort strategy of getting in a car, driving to a place and annoying someone in-person enough to get my problem solved. But email is the only exception.
I've tried looking for providers in my country, but they all went out of business around the time gmail launched. So now my only options are international megacorps with no support for anyone without 100k twitter followers or small companies with offices on the other side of the continent.
DNS is used to figure out initial point of contact over SMTP, nothing stops said SMTP server to recognize recipient as transferred account and forward message to SMTP server account was transferred to.
Of course, but that still relies on the SMTP server's support. If a provider goes out of business or simply refuses to forward messages, an email address is still dead. That's why we'd need laws to regulate both scenarios: require operators to forward old accounts regardless of anything (including things like government sanctions) and set up a central email forwarder organization to take on email domains of defunct providers (and the legal framework to transfer domains to it).
An ideal system would of course allow you to truly take your address with you to another provider and sever any link to your old one, just like you can with your phone number. The current semantics of email addresses don't allow that or require you to own your own domain name, which given the sad state of the business end of the DNS, isn't feasible on a large scale either.
That would only help if you transferred an entire domain, surely? The initial DNS lookup doesn't have the local part that you'd need to identify individual accounts, does it?
I don't see a massive difference between a Gmail account and a phone number. One is typically provided by a company, in a competitive marketplace, with rivals available. That one is regulated and has to adhere to portability which lets you continue to make and receive calls using that number indefinitely, without any further payment.
The other is provided by a large company, again in a (semi) competitive marketplace, but is totally unregulated and can kick you out at any time. They don't let you migrate your email address, and you can't send or receive mail to/from it if the company throws you into a Kafka loop.
It strikes me the anomaly is that email service isn't forced to be portable and delivered as a baseline utility, with "send on behalf of" and "forward without looking at or storing" as non commercial, non charged functionality that must be offered indefinitely, so a user can port their mail if they move away from a provider.
When looked at this way, I don't see the difference between mobile service and email - mobile providers don't enjoy a monopoly, but are regulated and need to deliver portability free of charge.
You started with "Gmail" and then switched to "email".
Much of what you say is not true with email in general. I own my own domain and I absolutely can take my email address anywhere.
Also, keep in mind that people typically pay for phone service. I do not think you can demand portability if a company provides you a phone number for free (which some do).
If you want portability for email, buy your own domain.
The type of regulation you are suggesting is consistent with what I am talking about. All utility services don't have to have the same exact rules. You can always be banned (even from driving on public roads), but just not without being given a stated reason and the chance to appeal it to an actual human who has to follow some set of consistent rules or due process.
The are critical pieces of the modern world yes. But not a utility. One cannot live without a utility and utilities generally have a monopoly in most places. If my power or water company bans me for some reason I am toast. I have to endure undue hardship to get something that provides may be 10% of the utility (own well, water pump, generator...). Internet itself (the pipes) on the other hand are probably a utility. I prefer the natural gas like solution though for internet. Someone owns the infrastructure and it is heavily regulated. Multiple other companies resell it, provide addon services etc. But search, email etc are like cars in the US. Essential, but also a business operating in a competitive space.
A service does not have to be a monopoly to be classified as a utility, nor does it have to be life-threatening if inaccessible. Mobile phone in my country is provided by 4 major independent companies (and this isn't the US but a country with only a few M people, so 4 big providers is a pretty good number) and they are still required to allow free transfers of numbers to other providers.
> One cannot live without a utility...
If my water got shut off, my life would go on pretty normally - drinking water is cheap in stores, bars are required to provide it free of charge and I can shower at a friend's place or something. If I lost my email account however, I'd have months of work ahead of me just to restore my digital life to its previous state and my livelihood would be at risk. All bills go to my email so I couldn't pay for the services I and my business need, business partners wouldn't be able to reach me, neither would my customers... In fact, I can't really think of any other single thing that would cause more problems if lost than my email account(s).
The problem with that logic is that just the plain internet access is becoming less and less useful everyday as the internet moves more towards walled gardens. It's like if the basic phone service only allowed you to communicate with other land lines, but you had to have an account with Google / Apple to make and receive calls with Iphones / Androids.
So you think it would be ok for Honda to show up at your house and say "You can't have this anymore we're taking it" and then take all the stuff that happens to be in the car, even if you are using it for free?
I expect that Honda will set the terms under which I can use the car, and if I don't like them, I need to buy my own car.
As for the stuff in the car, it's a poor analogy. The stuff in your Gmail account is easy to duplicate, unlike physical stuff, and it's your responsibility to back it up.
As you can guess, I don't use free email services, and I don't rely on the mail always being in the hands of a provider - I always have my own copy via IMAP. This was the normal way to do email, and the barrier to entry is low - most people doing this in those days were not tech folks.
It's just silly to demand that a company spend money to provide something to you for free, and then demand they be treated as a utility. Especially where plenty of alternatives exist.
Imagine trying to run a small business without access to either Facebook, Google, or both. Business owners whose operations have been inadvertently banned have written about it at length; it appears to cause serious issues.
We kind of do, which is really the point. There are all sorts of regulations about making and selling bread to ensure safety and fitness for purpose as well as all sorts of programs such as SNAP, WIC, school lunches, many state programs, etc. all to ensure that everyone has access to bread.
Yes, and nearly everyone called it the moment Facebook bought Oculus. That any journalists at the time actually gave credence to Facebook's claims Oculus would remain independent is incredibly shameful.
As for me, my Rift sits unused in a box. The Oculus desktop software may be the worst piece of shit I've ever used and I can't lay eyes on it without wishing ill upon its developers.
As the owner of a second-hand Rift that I've refused to update to avoid any Facebook account requirement, I have to agree. The hardware is pretty good, albeit a bit out of date now, but the Oculus software is garbage.
I have to manually use task manager to kill all its processes and the service when I'm done with it or it will constantly wake up, cause 2 of my monitors to momentarily blank while it does something, and prevent my computer from sleeping.
On start it always asks me to confirm the storage location, and then complains that it isn't available anyway.
The library keeps forgetting that I have Beat Saber and I'm forced to launch it through Steam instead.
The only game I actually "purchased" in the Oculus store, Sensor Bounds ($0 tool), is considered to be uninstalled and can't be downloaded due to above mentioned "storage location" issue.
Again, I have intentionally avoided updating this since Facebook instituted the account requirement so it might be better now.
The OG Rift is still pretty great -- unlike the newer products, it doesn't require a Facebook account, and you can use it with SteamVR if you want and not really even bother with the Oculus software.
For now, that is: I was warned that it will be forced on me at a later date during setup. My next headset will probably be an index as a result.
I had gotten the original oculus because I was afraid of missing out on oculus exclusives, but I would only really miss super hot. (I also don’t understand how they shipped the new oculus without the eye spacing adjuster; my partner and I have different settings for it and get dizzy using the wrong one)
This is a horrible, rude, and insanely demeaning take.
Formerly one of those developers, finally got fed up with the beast and left. I continue to do VR dev.
1. The internals were actually some of the most robust software I've ever seen.
2. People who worked on it originally were some of the best devs I've ever seen across multiple companies
3. They uniformly got burnt out by incredible harassment from people who hated facebook transferring their hate to people who cared about games or VR - or, ironically, wanted to transition away from the facebook teams...because facebook.
4. Don't ascribe to developers what was clearly forced commandments from deeply flawed leadership decisions.
Those people doing the forcing in #4 are the first in line for blame. Not the developers. Maybe a little sprinkling of people similar to you.
Even if your internals were indeed "some of the most robust software" ever, your users didn't see the internals, they just saw the ads.
Even if you were (are) one of the "best devs" ever, you know the software equivalent of Michelangelo cannot be appreciated by anyone except another really good programmer, and there aren't that many of those, and they certainly aren't your users. Your users saw ads.
You cannot work for Facebook and enjoy that sweet sweet Facebook money, without having to accept, that everyone else you meet, will treat you like you sell ads, because that's what you do.
There are a lot of foot soldiers from many terrible episodes of history who I'm sure have your exact perspective. Your 4th point could have been lifted verbatim from just about any documentary about them. And then you throw it back on the OP because your feelings were hurt; time for a little critical self assessment.
Shouldn't have locked it behind a Facebook login then, eh? It could be the best thing since sliced bread, but it belongs on a trash heap as long as it requires a facebook login.
Yeah, but that was an executive decision, not a developer decision. It's absolutely the reason I'm never going to buy an Oculus, but it's a bit unfair to blame it on developers who had no influence on this decision. (Only a bit unfair, because those developers still choose to work there.)
I don't think you get a pass on the basis of "I just work here" unless you're in a position that you can't afford to lose that job. And if you are in that position, you can at least feel an appropriate level of shame for what you had to do.
> It's absolutely the reason I'm never going to buy an Oculus
Same, and that is also why I recommend the same to anyone who discusses VR: Do not buy Oculus.
I'm sorry you had to work there and saw your work get ruined by corporate greed, and I'm sure that you personally hold no blame for this, but that doesn't make the product as it exists today any less awful.
I draw the line at "wishing ill upon its developers". Yeah, we were a part of the beast and responsible for its output. And I did quit, as the sibling comment failed to notice in its blunt anger. Login was beyond controversial even amongst my peers.
My point was: If, as a critic of Oculus, you look for someone to feel a dull sense of non-actionable vengeance against, aim higher.
I left and my headset of choice is an Index, despite its software having much rougher edges.
Before going to extremes, many hacking victims try the usual routes to get customer service but quickly find out it seems impossible to reach someone at Facebook to help fix the problem.
Same story with AI lockouts at Google. Even if you do have access to "someone at Google" good luck getting a clear answer of what happened or how to fix the issue.
I think we can appreciate how this is a difficult problem though. Google support would get a torrent of actual hackers contacting them to gain access to someones account. Not restoring access to a few real cases is probably better than giving access over to a hacker.
GitLab recently said that customer support will not help restore access to your account if you lock yourself out unless you have an active subscription to your account and can use your billing details as verification.
How should google support handle this? Perhaps banks should offer an identify verification service?
Maybe hire some people to handle it? But that would cost them money. That's why companies like Google and Facebook have crap support. The cost of not having it hasn't exceeded the cost of implementing it.
The people are the problem, they can be tricked in to giving access to the wrong person. That's why I'm suggesting some kind of identify verification service is the only safe way.
It is not reasonable to have every service have it's own identity verification venue in every city so it would have to be centralized some how.
How come other tech companies can handle customer support but Facebook can't? Oh that's right they can but just don't do it. It's not like they can't afford it but would mean slightly less profits. Like I said they don't do it because the cost of not having a support staff hasn't exceeded the financial liability of not having one. Tech companies can and do provide customer support at scale. It's not that it can't be done, Facebook just doesn't do it because you losing your account is an unnoticeably minute lose of potential revenue compared to the cost of providing support. You losing your Facebook account doesn't cost Facebook shit. Fixing that problem does. But instead of just proposing Facebook hire a support staff you want everyone to now give copies of their ID's to Facebook instead? Facebook. One of the most egregious exploiters of our personal information for profit. And the answer is to just give them more because the massive amount of information they already have isn't enough to solve this trivial issue. Have you considered that Facebook is just a corporation who's sole purpose is to generate revenue for it's owners and shareholders like every other corporation and you are just a commodity to them? Facebook has the money to solve your problems with Facebook but why would they bother when no matter what they do everyone just keeps using Facebook.
>How come other tech companies can handle customer support
I would challenge that assumption. There are countless stories of ISPs, carriers, Sony, etc handing over someones account to a hacker because the hacker called up and said they were locked out. How do you verify someone who has called up on the phone to see they are the real owner of the account and not the person who knows the current password?
I would rather have maximum security on my account. 2FA, other methods of verification. And if I get locked out I get locked out. Hopefully the account would be set up to self destruct after n months inactivity. I can create a new account and upload my backups. I would much rather this than allowing some random tech support person hand over my account to someone on the phone.
There is also the "You get what you pay for" thing. Support costs money and people are not paying for Facebook. I pay for a Google One subscription and this gives me access to customer support. I also do a monthly data dump using Google Takeout so I am prepared to either create a new google account or move to an alternative platform if my account is locked.
Getting locked out and having no one access my account is far preferable to having someone else given access to my account.
That puts all the power in the hands of this identity verification system. They could ban a product or person with no recourse, and be even more centralized (monopolistic).
Which is why such a service should never be both centralized and private. The post office probably isn't going to ban you. For banks, there's many to choose from.
> Perhaps banks should offer an identify verification service?
Not sure if you mean specifically the google+bank case but that's a thing in my country, it's called "bank identity".
I file my taxes and social security forms (and can access my covid tests records) while my bank vouches for my identity, i.e. I have to go through their regular internet banking login + 2FA.
Maybe the fear here is the divorce scenario? I could see someone being trusted for many years up until yesterday, when they suddenly become someone you don’t want in your account.
Disagree. A company as big as google should have the decency to at least have a human reach out to paying developers before they permanently ban apps which developers use to make a living:
There is a difference between user account support and developer support. I agree developer support needs work but user account support is available for paying customers.
The utter lack of customer service options at Google is just one of the reasons to avoid EVER having ANYTHING important to your or your business dependent on them. Maybe they lock you out, maybe they discontinue the service, there's nothing you can do to be sure that won't happen.
Yep. Even developers with apps which might have gotten wrongly flagged by the artificial unintelligence only get to talk to automated emails unless they can create a big enough shit storm on social media to get a few tech blogs to write about it.
A very recent example was Droid script app on Android:
Still waiting for the adsense money Google owes me from 13 years ago... they conveniently banned me pretending I was clicking on my own ads... I never did that... and again, they 100% know it's bullshit, they send me a 50€ voucher for ad-word to my physical address, like it was any sort of fair compensation...
> He plans to return the unopened device, and while he's glad the strategy worked, he doesn't think it's fair. "The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you've actually purchased something from them," he said.
I think this guy just figured out the “customer” part of “customer service”. This, I think, illustrates the issue with Facebook well.
This recall is only for the foam face insert. It's removable and probably very inexpensive to make / replace. Oculus is sending free replacements to folks.
I am an avid Quest 2 user since ~October. I play Population:one and _love_ it. It's a team-based Battle Royale. I am just blown away by how much fun and social it is. It's been a godsend during the pandemic.
The Quest 2 is only $300 - I strongly recommend it!
If anyone else is on the fence about the Quest 2, I received on as a gift, and it has totally blown me away. I was previously somewhat skeptical of VR, but it's so fun. FWIW, it also feels a bit _different_ than normal video games, because you're on your feet, moving your body, etc.
It does, but "requires a Facebook account" doesn't entirely capture the nature of Oculus' requirements. If, for instance, Twitter sold hardware that required a Twitter account, that would indeed be the beginning and end of it – create a new Twitter account for the hardware, and off you go.
What Oculus requires, however, is your Facebook account, as in the one you created over a decade ago and never use but is full of all your friends' pictures of their children and/or political memes.
Creating a separate account just for using the hardware is not only expressly forbidden, but can result in you being locked out of your device: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/oculus-quest-2-users-banne... And if you truly do not have an existing account, good luck convincing the algorithms of that.
Interesting, did not know that they could ban people for that. I did exactly this and haven't had an issue yet. Maybe because I've purchased games through their store. Fingers crossed.
No, there are numerous accounts online of people losing all their purchases because of violating their terms of service or whatever. Having purchased content won't help.
FB runs bots over the platform to detect these accounts. Since they have everyone's contact list, they can just check your friends list and see if you appear in their contact lists. If not, they will lock you out and require you to send a photo of your ID.
And even if they have not yet, they can at any time and all of your games and hardware get locked which is permitted in their ToS. Why would you want to take this risk when the alternative platforms do not have real identity rules.
Hmm, I can understand getting banned for having a side account. But GP claims they fully deleted their account, and created a new one. What is Facebook gonna do, punish them for no longer having a FB account? What if I happened to have deleted my FB account a year ago and want to play Oculus now?
For people who don't care about the account they made a decade ago and no longer use, this seems like a reasonable and probably safe approach.
I was asked by Facebook to create a second account and hand the details over to their developers in order for them to have access to a platform we're developing for some validation regarding our use of OAuth, it's probably also against their TOS, yet had I not done that they would've locked us and our users of OAuth...
I’ve dealt with this before, I routinely break my social graphs. New email address, dont link a phone number or not one that youve ever given to anybody.
The trick is, on the first session upload a profile photo or two or three, and actually friend a few people.
Last I checked, it wasn't a TOS violation to have multiple Microsoft accounts like it is with FB. Microsoft even has some official support for for work vs personal accounts
> Creating a separate account just for using the hardware is not only expressly forbidden, but can result in you being locked out of your device:
I'm not one to defend Facebook, but what you've said is just not true. That only happened to a handful of people at the very beginning and was likely a moderation bug. People aren't getting banned for having burner accounts.
it's hard to judge how frequent but there are a continuous stream of people and even one prominent YouTube reviewer who got their whole FB account banned (sometimes their actual lifelong account).
You've had burner accounts disabled, or you've had your oculus quest 2 disabled for using burner accounts multiple times over several years? Impressive considering it's been out for less than a year.
But it doesn't have access to the consumer-facing store and is intended solely for internal business usage (for example, employee training and the like.)
You can actually obtain it with access to the consumer facing store now, but you couldn't when that scheme launched.
But there is no way to switch between these options, or even to upgrade the consumer hardware you had to buy to get stuff out of the door when they launched without this functionality to be able to utilise the business accounts, even if you were willing to pay to do so. The answer is literally to junk your existing hardware investment.
It's really a crazy mess. Nobody at Facebook/Oculus seems to really care about how this is supposed to work for businesses developing for the platform in practice.
It seems so much harder than just permitting business users to set up a "faux" account that can be used for company wide demo machines (and managed only by signing into that account, not having to buy specific hardware), even if a bunch of verification was required for that initial setup.
It's highly risky .... it is directly against Facebook TOS and people are actively banned for it, not only losing all their purchases but sometimes their lifelong real facebook account as well.
I used a throwaway email, phone, fake photos and friended a number of accounts. I have nothing connecting it to my "real" facebook and/or social graph. Maybe I'm lucky.
> "The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you've actually purchased something from them," he said.
Seriously, this sounds super-entitled to me.
Why is this unfair?
Also, the advertising supported-model has so many negative consequences. Pragmatically, FB isn't just going to fade away, so wouldn't it be better if they evolved towards a paid model? (Or at least the option to pay.)
Because Facebook doesn't offer a regular subscription service, and for lots of people Facebook is how they stay in contact with their friends and family. So being SOL because some asshole is trying to steal your account sucks. There's nothing "entitled" about wanting back something you lost because of no fault of your own.
I think if FB offered a $5 “talk to a human” option or a premium tier for users, then people would be satisfied. But instead there is this clunky hack of buying an Oculus device.
Wife’s account was hacked. 15 years old, thousands of photos.
As in she got an email saying new login. I told her to go to app and change password. Nope. They had changed the email and phone number associated with it.
That was that.
Spent entire day on it and all we could get was the to have account locked.
Completely impossible to talk to anyone. Nearly got the occulas to try and back door it.
I have backups of many but not all.
Lots of tears. Turns out almost all of her friends have lost their original accounts.
People like to criticize ML, but my worst experience with Facebook was caused by a truly fucked up rule based system that banned my startup's Instagram account because the account operator changed the email address too quickly after merging it with a Facebook ads account. No machine learning, no probabilities, just "if (event that is usually sketchy) { ban with no appeal }"
Even as a Facebook employee, there was nothing I could do to help (I joined Facebook after leaving this startup, but still wanted to help because I founded it). Even determining the cause of the ban could have cost me my job (for good reason, don't want corruption and bribery, etc).
I understand the need to be cautious, but based on my analysis at the time the false positive rate was over 5% for this particular rule (based on later reactivations). Seemed way to high considering my startup had spent over 50K on FB ads in the connected account.
I have stopped receiving messenger notifications whenever I have the Facebook app open. Like no unread bubble or anything. It has caused me to stop using the Facebook app almost completely (which, honestly, is probably a good thing).
But, the inner QA in me wants to file a ticket and hunt down a fix. It bugs me in the back of my mind. I’ve tried searching for a fix, but nobody seems to have the same exact issue. I’ve tried uninstalling both apps and reinstalling in various orders to no avail.
I wish I could just call or chat with support and get a meaningful conversation going with someone who could actually help (as opposed to reading from a script).
I honestly do not understand why any sentient person would have anything to do with Facebook at this point, VR headsets or not. It is just an awful company, period.
It is, but because the majority of people are unaware (or simply don’t care) then it can be hard to avoid. During lockdown I deleted all of my accounts on Facebook owned products, including WhatsApp, but I began to feel increasingly isolated.
Now life is more “normal”, it’s very difficult to meet someone in a bar/club and tell them you don’t have Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp without sounding dodgy. Sad reality I’ve found as a 25 year old single man in London.
Genuinely curious, how is Facebook the only way you have to contact friends and family? Do you not have their email addresses or phone numbers? Or even physical addresses? What if you get locked out of your Facebook account?
Not really, considering that every person who used the trick didn't even open it and returned it immediately after getting their account recovered. Facebook already caught on to this.
The real moral is to not build your company without any modicum of user support.
The users who have any clue what 2FA is are not the ones getting their account hacked. They are the 60+ year olds who use Facebook as their only contact with friend and family, unfortunately.
Sadly, the moral is that you can build a company without user support. You just need to grow fast past the stage where users can ignore you.
Even if you don’t have a FB account you are in danger of imposter creating one for you.
A very small percent of customers require support and you can safely ignore them.
You're even more-so the product with a FB device on your head. You're just paying to be tracked in a much more intimate way than before, why else would they now require a FB login?
Ironically enough I made a new Facebook account for my Quest2 because I was worried that should they ban my actual Facebook account, I would lose all my purchases... I don't care if it's against the TOS, I'm more likely to lose my main account at this point anyway.
"The very first concern, after realizing that I was getting hacked, is that these folks might be able to gain access to my business's bank account,"
How can that be possible? Surely either the bank incorrectly trusts the hacker in which case it's the bank's error and they'll refund any stolen money, or the customer gave Facebook his secret bank credentials but that seems pretty weird and unlikely.
At least that's how it is in my country. Banks have simple obvious rules that you have to follow and then you're never on the hook for stolen money. Basically don't give your PIN number or password to anyone. You don't need to worry about all the complicated vulnerabilities that you do with websites which don't take responsibility for their security.
Maybe this is good? The start of FB going from completely ad-driven to partially a for-pay service?
(I mean... the Quest 2 is probably being sold at a loss with the idea that it'll help make money from ads... but also, the game store, which is not as icky as their privacy-destroying ad business.)
Am an Oculus owner. Am a real user (check my profile). Am not affiliated with Facebook.
I love my Oculus device (life changing indeed as someone else put it in the thread above) and detest Facebook. Is it that hard to believe other people might be in a similar situation?
You're not allowed to say that on HN (I don't disapprove of you saying it however and I've said the same thing myself - the point of my comment is that it's ridiculous to disallow comments like that)
The rule for it is pretty straightforward, to quote dang about it:
>As I've tried to explain many times (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), there are two problems: (1) real abuse is happening on the internet; and (2) internet users frequently imagine that they're seeing such abuse when in reality they are merely seeing something they dislike. Both problems are serious, but for entirely different reasons, and we need to be careful not to confuse them, since (2) is extremely common, indeed is the laziest internet production that exists. Allowing people to do #2 everywhere (so to speak) could easily destroy the community.
>Fortunately, a simple rule turns out to suffice: don't post accusations of abuse unless you have some bit of evidence to go on. Someone else having a different view than you does not count as evidence. You need at least a shred of something objective, and if you don't have that, then you can't post accusations. Since the overwhelming majority of #2 posts have no evidence, that rules them out. Getting people to actually follow this rule is a different issue of course.
The really shocking thing is the lack of any delay with email changes. I've known several people whose accounts were hacked and properly flagged by Facebook within hours but the hacker was able to change the email address immediately with no waiting period and remove the other addresses so access was impossible.
I tried this on my own account shortly after and, sure enough, there's no waiting period where previous emails remain allowed to reset passwords.
I suspect once this kind of workaround becomes known it's also a target for hackers - if there's a way around Facebook support to access an account, hackers will use it too.
I understand the struggle of trying to provide free support to billions of users, but more companies should provide a "pay a fee for real customer support" kinda hot line. Whatever price is costs to provide said support, honestly, many would be happy to pay for it.
Google sorta does this through Google One, it's 2-3$ a month and you also get some extra storage space. It's not perfect but you actually get to talk to a real human being.
Facebook should send a highly secure second password for safe keeping when an established (ie not new) account requests it. This password can be entered in emergencies like this to deactivate the account until proper ownership can be established.
Yeah, about that...it's now real. I don't have the source but I remember seeing either Sony or Microsoft actually having filed a patent doing this very thing: reciting an advertising phrase (or doing some mocapped thing) in order to continue using the platform.
During a lecture on clickwrap contracts the prof asked for ideas for making customers actually read contracts. Having them type out the contract was considered too far, but having them READ ALOUD key parts was deemed acceptable by the class.
If the parts they have to read out loud would be the important parts, than that might be a real improvement over the status quo, as it would made people more aware of what shitty things they are usually agreeing to.
I _love_ my Mockulus Qwest no. 9. I’ve taken to wearing it to bed so I get to earn Zuckbucks whilst I sleep!
[P.S. Palmer Eldritch is a genie, Suckerberg’s man boobs are the digital reincarnation of those of Augustus Caesar, and Peter Teak is a modern Medici (and all-round handsome rake)!]
Microsoft saw the concept of touchscreens and bought out "Surface" around 2003ish; and as a result, we didn't get widespread touchscreens until about a decade or so later.
This is more of an alternative statement for anyone interested since your statement didn't give anything concrete.
Oculus is far far ahead of where any VR developers thought it would be in 2021. In January of 2019 the Rift was still running on cables connected to a $2000 laptop and confined to a 5x5ft square play area with 7 foot tall poles holding scanners on each corner,also plugged into the same computer. If you wanted to experience VR, you had to have all those things and set them up.
Now for $300 I can (and have) experience VR on a beach with no Internet or electricity for a couple hours.
The opinion of most VR developers I know is that Facebook have unequivocally advanced VR headset progression more than any other company and better than we couldve ever hoped.
So right! A lot of it comes down to the availability of Qualcomm's XR2 chip but Oculus has made VR accessable to anyone for half the price of a mobile phone and that is a game changer. Lot of noise lately about the death of VR [1] or PCVR [2] but my money says things in 3D are just about to lift off.
Have you used the product and the software and games they've been publishing?
Honestly they're the only players in the industry treating it as more than a hobby and the only viable headset for mass consumers. I think without their pressure Valve would have never bothered with the Index or HL:Alyx.
October 2020 was the month before the US election, and the peak of both disinformation/influence campaigns, and of Facebook-the-website's efforts to combat those campaigns. So the spambot detector sensitivity was turned up to max that month, and if you tried to create a new account, there was a large chance you'd be mistaken for a bot and banned immediately. So a bunch of people who weren't Facebook users got fancy new VR headsets, tried to create Facebook accounts in order to be able to use them, and got immediately banned. The support department for Facebook-the-website was not at all up to the task of dealing with this. This kind of wrecked their product launch; instead of the press coverage and public reaction being about how great their hardware was, it was about all the people who couldn't use their hardware because of account issues.
So now Oculus has a completely separate support department for Facebook account issues, which acts less like it's supporting a free website and more like it's supporting a $300 piece of hardware. And if you have an account issue with the website, and you want to use that support department instead of the bad one, then buying a Quest 2 is not such a bad idea.