Facebook halts Oculus Quest sales in Germany amid privacy concerns:
Facebook subsidiary Oculus says it has "temporarily paused" sales of Oculus Quest headsets to customers in Germany. Reports suggest the move is in response to concerns from German regulators about the recently announced requirement that all Oculus users will need to use a Facebook account by 2023 to log in to the device.
[...] Facebook declined an opportunity to provide additional comment to Ars Technica. But in a statement to German News site Heise Online (machine translation), the company said the move was due to "outstanding talks with German supervisory authorities... We were not obliged to take this measure, but proactively interrupted the sale."
Previously:
Facebook has Begun Ghosting the "Oculus" Moniker in its VR Division
Oculus to Begin Requiring Facebook Accounts to Use VR Headsets
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Our "Facebookening of Oculus" series continues today with the announcement of the Facebook Connect conference as a free, live-streamed event on September 16. You may remember years of "Oculus Connect" conferences, which focused on the company's efforts in virtual reality and other "mixed reality" mediums. That conference is dead. It's Facebook Connect now.
[...] What's more, Facebook used the Tuesday announcement as an opportunity to rename its entire Oculus VR division: Facebook Reality Labs. That name may sound familiar, since it was given to a number of skunkworks teams working on experimental VR-like features and hardware (including years of focus on 3D spatial audio at its Seattle-area office).
Facebook isn't shy about explaining why it is renaming everything: to collate and combine its disparate entities in order to "build the next computing platform to help people feel more present with each other, even when we're apart." That sure sounds like a bold admission of the so-called "Facebook operating system" that I keep hearing rumors about, with VR, mixed reality, and smartphone cameras at its core. Facebook has spent months hinting at mixed computing systems being combined in the workplace, which the company has conveniently summarized in a new Facebook Reality Labs post from today.
Previously:
Oculus to Begin Requiring Facebook Accounts to Use VR Headsets
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @03:49AM (1 child)
And all 3 prospective German customers were devastated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @04:14PM
That's what they get for buying stuff from a Suckerberg and ordering it through a Bozo's website.
But if you order a Tesla hopefully it won't smell like an Elon Musky.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday September 04 2020, @04:49AM
Facebook requires that all persons who value their privacy refrain from buying Oculus products.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 04 2020, @09:14AM (1 child)
I ordered a VR set from Valve - 8+ weeks wait...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday September 04 2020, @03:38PM
I noticed that a month or two ago. I also noticed that the prices on e-bay for an Index, were in most cases, more than buying a new one. I guess they're having some supply issues and/or there's been a massive uptick in the number of people wanting to purchase a Valve Index. It would be hilarious, if all of the recent Facebookening of Oculus was contributing to uptake on the Valve Index. I'd guess that those who are already in the Oculus ecosystem aren't doing a mass exit, though.
Then again, maybe enough friends showed their friends Porn on VR? Isn't that the running joke / not joke?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday September 04 2020, @01:50PM
The more headlines there are like this, hopefully the greater the awareness of the privacy implications (and ideally less cultural acceptance of them). Still, how many people would even see this headline outside of Nerdland, except possibly in Germany? I bet there's a pretty significant proportion of the population now that get all their news via Farcebook--would this news even show up on there?
Also, when are we going to start to see similar headlines about Farcebook's other products like WhatsApp or Instagram?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?