Tone Deaf Facebook To Cripple VR Headsets Unless You Link It To Your Facebook Account

from the what's-the-opposite-of-advertising dept

Back in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus, there were the usual pre-merger promises that nothing would really change, or that Facebook wouldn't erode everything folks liked about the independent kickstarted product. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who has since moved on to selling border surveillance tech to the Trump administration, made oodles of promises to that effect before taking his money and running toward the sunset. Among those promises was the promise users would never be forced to use a Facebook login account just to use your VR headset and its games, and that the company wouldn't track your behavior for advertising.

Like every major merger, those promises didn't mean much. This week, Facebook and Oculus announced that users will soon be forced to -- use a Facebook account if they want to be able to keep using Oculus hardware, so the company can track its users for advertising purposes. The official Oculus announcement tries to pretend that this is some innate gift to the end user, instead of just an obvious way for Facebook to expand its behavioral advertising empire:

"Giving people a single way to log into Oculus—using their Facebook account and password— will make it easier to find, connect, and play with friends in VR. We know that social VR has so much more to offer, and this change will make it possible to integrate many of the features people know and love on Facebook."

And while users won't be forced to fully use Facebook to login until 2023, those that don't want Facebook tracking their every online waking movement will be out of luck. Meaning that you may not be able to use your pricey hardware -- or the software you've been accumulating -- unless you agree to join the Facebook universe:

"After January 1, 2023, we will end support for Oculus accounts. If you choose not to merge your accounts at that time, you can continue using your device, but full functionality will require a Facebook account. We will take steps to allow you to keep using content you have purchased, though we expect some games and apps may no longer work. This could be because they include features that require a Facebook account or because a developer has chosen to no longer support the app or game you purchased. All future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook account, even if you already have an Oculus account."

The changes will also impact the functionality of Oculus Quest's "Link," which lets users connect the standalone VR headset to a PC to expand its functionality. It also begs the question: what happens if you get banned by Facebook due to its incoherent and inconsistent moderation strategies? You suddenly can't use your VR headset because Facebook's algorithms stupidly ban you for posting photos of yourself breastfeeding?

This being Facebook, there's not a mention of any ability to prevent Facebook from being able to track the entirety of your behavior while using a VR headset. Given all the justified criticism of Facebook, the consumer response (especially among those that liked Oculus but have tried to avoid Facebook) is about what you'd expect over at forums like the Oculus subreddit:

The whole thing is very tone deaf, and very... Facebook. Facebook's need to track and monetize Oculus user behavior bulldozed over any concerns the company may have had about interoperability, or any valid concerns that this could simply drive customers to more open competitors. It's yet another example of users buying a product and features they believe they own, only to have functionality eroded or the terms of use dramatically modified down the road. It's also yet another example of how, more often than not, the promises made ahead of major U.S. mergers mean absolutely nothing.

Filed Under: accounts, facebook account, logins, oculus, vr, vr headsets
Companies: facebook, oculus

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint Want Even Broader Access To Your Personal Data

from the hard-pass dept

We've noted repeatedly that however bad Facebook has been on privacy (pretty clearly terrible), the broadband industry has traditionally been much, much worse. From AT&T's efforts to charge consumers more just to protect their privacy, to Verizon getting busted for covertly tracking users around the internet without telling them (or letting users opt out), this is not an industry that respects you or your privacy. That's before we even get to their cozy, often mindlessly-loyal relationship with intelligence and law enforcement.

As such, it's kind of amusing to note that these are the same companies now trying to position themselves as the gatekeepers of all of your private data online. As security expert Brian Krebs notes, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint (the latter two of which will likely soon be one company) are cooking up something dubbed "Project Verify," which would let end users eschew traditional website passwords -- instead authenticating visitors by leveraging data elements unique to each customer’s phone and mobile subscriber account, including location, "customer reputation", and device hardware specs.

This video by the carriers offers a little more detail:

The problem, as Krebs is quick to note, is that giving more private data to companies with an utterly abysmal track record on privacy might not be a particularly bright idea:

"A key question about adoption of this fledgling initiative will be how much trust consumers place with the wireless companies, which have struggled mightily over the past several years to validate that their own customers are who they say they are."

As we've been noting, these are the same companies that have been struggling to prevent hackers from routinely stealing customer identities via SIM hijacking, which involves a hacker bribing an employee to port your phone number to a new device, then jacking your identity and making off with your private data (or making millions by selling your cryptocurrency or valuable accounts). These are also the same carriers that have routinely failed to do much about the SS7 exploit that's been in the wild for seemingly ever, allowing hackers to spy on an undetermined number of cellular customers for years.

These are also the same wireless carriers that were just caught up in a massive scandal involving their collection of sale of user location data, a multi-billion dollar venture that involves selling your daily motion habits to a cavalcade of different companies, many of which have shown a similarly-flimsy disregard for actually keeping that data safe. And these are the same companies that work tirelessly to scuttle any and every effort to actually shore up nationwide privacy standards, usually by lying to lawmakers and the public about what these plans would actually do.

For his part, Krebs thinks this is a hard pass:

"I am not likely to ever take the carriers up on this offer. In fact, I’ve been working hard of late to disconnect my digital life from these mobile providers. And I’m not about to volunteer more information than necessary beyond the bare minimum needed to have wireless service."

Other widely-respected security reporters were similarly unimpressed:

Again, the devil will be in the details. But at first glimpse, you'd be pretty foolish to trust companies with additional private data that have repeatedly proven to be routinely cavalier about the oceans of data they already collect. Time and time again wireless carriers have prioritized profits over the personal interest and welfare of consumers, and anybody expecting that to magically change ahead of Project Verify's launch haven't been paying attention.

Filed Under: accounts, digital identity, passwords, privacy, project verify, telcos
Companies: at&t, sprint, t-mobile, verizon

NSA/FBI Got Access To Content Of Around 40,000 Yahoo/Google User Accounts In First Six Months Of 2013

from the it's-a-lot dept

Last week, we noted that the DOJ and various internet companies had settled their legal fight, which concerned whether or not those companies could reveal the details of how many FISA Court requests they were receiving -- both in terms of how many requests they get and how many accounts are impacted. While Apple immediately released their information, showing very few users impacted, the real interest is in Google, Yahoo and to a lesser extent Facebook. Both Google and Yahoo have put out blog posts updating their transparency report numbers. It appears that both Yahoo and Google decided to go with "option 1" in the settlement, which lets them reports NSLs and FISA orders separately, but in bands of 0-999. The big question with both of them, really, was just how many "customer accounts affected" there would be, and both presented numbers (in slightly different formats). Google showed a historical listing: Yahoo just shows the most recent: If you remember, by choosing Option 1, the companies could actually show "customer accounts affected" -- if they had chosen option 2, they could only show targeted customers, leaving out others who were affected as well. But here we see that the number of accounts affected is much larger than the number of requests (though certainly much more limited than some assumed). That is, these requests (which make up a large part of the PRISM program) impact thousands of users, but not millions or "all" as some have claimed. There may very well be other NSA surveillance programs that get data from many more users, but not the FISA orders/PRISM.

Concerning the Google data, you can see that there's been a pretty big increase in the number of users impacted over the past few years, peaking at the end of 2012, but that drop in the beginning of 2013 may be just seasonal. Meanwhile, it's interesting to see that a much larger number of Yahoo accounts have been impacted. Of course, for all we know, there could have been one FISA order to Google and three to Yahoo and then the number of accounts impacted would be around 10,000 per order. But, without more granularity, it's impossible to tell.

What does seem clear is that there are about 40,000 accounts on Yahoo or Google to which the NSA/FBI and others in the intelligence community have access.

Update: Facebook and Microsoft have updated their info as well and it's more of the same:

Microsoft, a major surveillance partner for the US government, received fewer than 1,000 orders from the Fisa court for communications content during the same period, related to between 15,000 and 15,999 “accounts or individual identifiers”.

The company, which owns the internet video calling service Skype, also disclosed that it received fewer than 1,000 orders for metadata – which reveals communications patterns rather than individual message content – related to fewer than 1,000 accounts or identifiers.

[....] Facebook disclosed that during the first half of 2013, it turned over content data from between 5000 and 5999 accounts – a rise of about 1000 from the previous six month period – and customer metadata associated with up to 999 accounts.

Filed Under: accounts, content, fbi, fisa, fisa orders, fisc, nsa, prism, surveillance, transparency report
Companies: google, yahoo

Time Warner Cable Systematically Looking To Shut Down Parodist's Accounts

from the not-a-huge-surprise dept

Well, this won't come as a huge surprise. Twice this week we've written about a pair of parodists who have been mocking Time Warner Cable and its customer service, first with a video in which they pretend to be TWC Customer Service reps asking people how they can make service worse for customers, and then involving a recording with a customer service rep who suggested that you weren't allowed to record your phone calls with TWC Customer service, even though they were recording you. The efforts were part of a parody campaign for a website called TWCCustomerService.com. For what it's worth, Time Warner has since said that there is no corporate policy saying that callers cannot record their calls, and that was merely a case of one rep overreacting.

That said, Time Warner Cable has apparently decided that the duo at TWCCustomerService have gone way too far in their parody attempt and have been going after their various social media accounts one by one. Already killed are their YouTube account and a bunch of Twitter accounts. The latest is that TWC's legal department has approached GoDaddy, seeking to have the TWCCustomerService.com domain name taken away. According to Kevin Collier at DailyDot, the guys are actually Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler of the comedy duo The Good Liars, and they have a history of doing similar types of pranks. In this case, TWC claims that the duo went too far in using the real name (and image) of Time Warner Cable's CEO, Glenn Britt.

As we noted in our first post about them, some might think that their website and efforts pushed some boundaries, since nowhere do they state directly that they're a parody account, but any human being with a few functioning brain cells should be able to tell within seconds that these guys clearly do not represent Time Warner Cable at all. I can understand why TWC decided to try to shut down the various accounts, but, in the end that's probably exactly what Selvig and Stiefler wanted, as it merely serves to call that much more attention to their antics.

Filed Under: accounts, customer service, parody, social media, twc customer service
Companies: time warner cable

Who 'Owns' A Twitter Account: Employer Or Employee?

from the there's-going-to-be-a-legal-fight dept

Venkat Balasubramani, inspired by Marshall Kirkpatrick, recently explored the legal issue over who "owns" your Twitter account: you or your employer. Most people signed up for their own Twitter account, but many have used them in connection to their jobs, and the issue that kicked off Venkat's discussion was the recent firing of CNN's Rick Sanchez, who had a large Twitter following, which he regularly tapped into as a part of his job at CNN. The summary: um... it's not clear. If CNN wanted to, it could try to claim some right to the account, suggesting the followers were in large part due to CNN -- but that seems like a stretch. To date, most companies have pretty much assumed that the individual "owns" the account. I can't recall any examples of someone being forced to hand over their "personal" Twitter account upon leaving a job. However, the fact that it's such a gray area suggest that we'll eventually see a lawsuit over this in some form or another. It seems likely that things like this are going to start appearing in employment contracts as well (who owns what...), but for now it's simply an interesting legal hypothetical...

Filed Under: accounts, ownership

Facebook Restores Accounts Of 3 Critics It Mysteriously Deleted

from the don't-piss-off-facebook? dept

Apparently, three Argentines who worked on a book that mocks Facebook mysteriously had their Facebook accounts deleted in January. On top of that, a Facebook group of fans, who numbered in the tens of thousands, also disappeared. After the deleted profiles finally started getting attention, Facebook admitted it made a "mistake" and put the profiles back. The three individuals had been trying to get an explanation from Facebook for weeks with no luck -- and it was only when the press started picking up on the story that Facebook admitted its "mistake." Either way, it's a reminder that what you do on Facebook can disappear in an instant based on the company's whims.

Filed Under: accounts, critics, deleted
Companies: facebook

Facebook Continues Blocking Apps That Help You Delete Your Facebook Account

from the get-a-sense-of-humor dept

Facebook is apparently really against against the idea of virtual euthanasia. Last week, we wrote about how it was blocking Seppukoo, a silly app that would let you kill your Facebook account. This week after people started talking about a similar service called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (which is similar, if a bit more inclusive -- it will delete all your web 2.0 profiles -- and entertaining -- you get to watch the deletions in realtime), Facebook again rushed forward to block access. Apparently Facebook has no sense of humor at all when it comes to you actually leaving its service.

Filed Under: accounts, social networks
Companies: facebook