Member-only story
Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 Has Some Serious Privacy Issues
A VR veteran weighs in on the problems with connecting your headset to Facebook
The leaks are true.
Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, just announced the Oculus Quest 2, a very decent low-end VR head-mounted display (HMD) for under $300. This has been the company’s own internal quest for many years: to most cheaply solve the most common frustrations users have with VR. The theory is, with everyone now cooped up at home, and with the drop in price, the Zoom-fatigued and occasionally unwashed masses will now jump into VR’s new immersive social experiences by the millions.
At least, that’s what Facebook hopes will happen.
The company must have bought millions of components in advance to get costs so low, which means that Facebook has probably invested at least $10 billion into Extended Reality (XR) at this point, possibly double that. Still, I assume they will easily make at least that much off their users in a few years.
But there are serious privacy concerns that are preventing many people, including me, from buying these devices. I recently ran a [not-very-scientific] poll on Twitter where the majority of respondents said they won’t buy any Facebook products at all. Second place was an option…
