The company famous for stealing your data let your data get stolen, now that’s a bitter irony.
Anyone who has been dipping their toes into the VR scene has likely heard about the apprehension of the Oculus community over the Facebook integration. For those who are not familiar allow me to summarise, in order to use the Oculus Quest 2 headset you need to connect it to an active Facebook account. This isn’t optional. Additionally, any current Oculus headsets such as the Gear VR, Oculus Go, Rift, Rift S, or the original Quest you can continue using your Oculus account until January 1st 2023 where you will be forced to merge it with your Facebook account.
Issues regarding this change have already started so surface with Facebook accounts being banned for a number of reasons, perhaps you didn’t want your real details shared with Facebook? Well , that’s a ban. Perhaps you decided to exercise your right to free speech and said something someone else didn’t like? That’s a ban. Or perhaps Facebook just doesn’t like your name. Yep, that’s a ban. And finally, maybe you’re transgender and you finally got your name legally changed and you wish to update your Facebook account…you can see where this is going.
Essentially if you’re banned for any of the reasons above or any of the numerous other silly reasons you can get your account banned, you can no longer use your Oculus headset without jail breaking it. Additionally, If you’re banned you cannot create a new account because that will just result in another ban for trying to circumvent the current ban and you’ll probably get your IP blacklisted on their system.
Now, if you’re like me and just wanted to bite the bullet and get it over with and decided to merge your Oculus account with Facebook or you bought a Quest 2 and had to set one up I have some unfortunate news for you. Over the last few days it has been revealed that that the personal data of over 533 million Facebook users across 106 countries has been leaked online in what is arguably one of the largest data breaches in history. To put it in perspective the Sony data breach of 2011 resulted in 77 million accounts being compromised.
The data that has been comprised has ranged from phone numbers, full names, locations, and email addresses among other types of sensitive data. There is a silver lining though, the compromised data was “old” data recorded in early 2019 and the breach was later fixed in August of 2019. They have now only decided to own up to the breach due to the data appearing online in public hacking forums.
If you have an account that is older than 2019 and your personal details such as your name or email address are the same as they were in 2019, then I would recommend checking Have I Been Pwned to see if your data has indeed been leaked. If your an Oculus user, I would recommend checking as well because the last thing you want is a ban out of nowhere because someone impersonated you online or uses the data they’ve stolen to access your account.
As with any type of data breach make sure you update your passwords and any other relevant data to ensure that, even if they have your data, they can’t use it against you. If you would like further information regarding the original Oculus/ Facebook merger please check out our article linked here when the news first dropped.
