Oculus Facebook Account Requirement Continues To Confuse

From a purely business point of view, it's no surprise really that Facebook wants to unify all its platforms under a single account. While it can't really force that on Instagram and WhatsApp, especially not while under intense scrutiny, it was able to put its hand down on the relatively younger Oculus ecosystem. Whether Facebook and Oculus really thought about it or not, it is only now that users are coming across the fine print regarding the Facebook account requirement for using Oculus devices and they're not good discoveries at all.

It seems that even Oculus' own staff got confused by their own rules. For a brief moment, the Internet was ablaze when Oculus Support revealed that you cannot use the same Facebook account on more than one Oculus device. That has the same implications of being limited to signing into Facebook on only one smartphone at a time.

Fortunately, this was apparently just a mistake, as the company clarified with Android Central. Unfortunately, another policy reported by HotHardware isn't and it lays it out in black and white. If you ever deactivate your Facebook account, you will not be able to use any Oculus product or even access your Oculus information.

On a technical level, this is understandable since you only have a single account for both Facebook and Oculus. On a practical level, it is bordering on absurd as people may have reasons to deactivate their Facebook accounts that are completely unrelated to their use of an Oculus VR headset. With this policy, unfortunately, there is no distinction between the two.

This is pretty much the same principle behind the earlier mess regarding new Facebook accounts being banned or flagged just after they signed up to use a new Oculus Quest 2. It almost feels as if the union of the two unrelated platforms wasn't really thought out properly. Either that or Facebook doesn't really care or, worse, is intentionally doing this to impose its unrelated social network on Oculus users.