Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Facebook, did a video AMA on his Instagram and provided a response to a question about users with problems accessing Facebook accounts, therefore limiting access to a Quest 2 which requires its use.
New Oculus Quest 2 owners can log in with Facebook, or existing Oculus users can merge their Facebook account with their Oculus one. Facebook hasn’t said specifically how many buyers have been affected by log in issues, stating that it is a “small number”.
In his Instagram AMA, Boz responded to a question from Benjamin Bega regarding reports that some users who create a new Facebook account, or re-activate a very old account, to use an Oculus Quest 2 are getting their accounts quickly suspended.
Boz gave me 3 clips of replies when everyone else got one, does this make me special? @hmltn @gemisisDev pic.twitter.com/E7kEAoZ8cK
— Benjamin Bega (@thebigdev433) October 16, 2020
This may be administered automatically by a machine learning agent, and the manual review process for suspensions can be difficult and lengthy. We’ve detailed all the information, reports from users and the official response from Facebook here.
Here’s the full question and response, transcribed:
Question: Any word on people getting their Facebook accounts banned, making quest useless?
Boz: Yeah of course, we’ve been tracking this from day one really closely, following up with every single individual case that comes across.
The number of cases isn’t large, but of course the impact is huge on those people and we take that really seriously. Every single person in VR matters to us.
So I mean I think people should continue to make sure their Facebook accounts are in good standing before they buy the headset. They can work through those problems before they do it.
And second of all is we are working really quickly through those and resolving all those issues that come up. There are Facebook account issues that can be solved and we’re working through them.
But I want to point out this is very common – Google, Apple, Xbox, pick a favorite. They make you sign in with an account and there’s a reason for that. We get to provide better services that way and stronger guarantees around things like data security, and compliance with regulations. So I’m a big fan of this move, even still.
The Oculus Quest 2 is available now. You can read our review here, and read more about the Facebook account verification situation here.
Thanks to Benjamin Bega for sending in the question and alerting UploadVR to Boz’s response.
