Tone Deaf Facebook Did Cripple VR Headsets When Borked BGP Routing Took Down All Of Facebook

from the who-could-have-predicted? dept

For over a year now, we have discussed Facebook's decision to require users of Oculus VR headsets to have active Facebook accounts linked to the devices in order for them to work properly. This decision came to be despite all the noise made by Oculus in 2014, when Facebook acquired the VR company, insisting that this very specific thing would not occur. Karl Bode, at the time, pointed out a number of potential issues this plan could cause, noting specifically that users could find their Oculus hardware broken for reasons not of their own making.

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?

And then, to the surprise of nobody here at Techdirt, a version of that very thing happened. Facebook users that had their accounts locked, typically due to having those accounts compromised by outside bad actors, found themselves unable to use their gear as normal and unable to get support through Facebook, especially if the issues were on legacy Oculus hardware for which the end user had not paid Facebook a penny. But a wonderful workaround was discovered! If those users went out and bought a brand new Oculus VR headset, suddenly Facebook support returned their messages.

None of this changed the core problem: what happens to owned hardware when suddenly a user's Facebook account wasn't accessible. Well, we all learned the answer to that question this week when Facebook accidentally decided to play a game of internet hide-and-seek by borking its BGP routing.

Facebook owns VR headset maker Oculus, and controversially requires Oculus Quest users to log in with a Facebook account. In numerous Reddit threads, many Quest owners say they have been able to use their headsets during the outage—to play VR games on Steam, for instance—but some say they can't load their Oculus libraries, and those who just took a Quest 2 out of the box have reported that they're unable to complete the initial setup.

"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Oculus wrote in one thread. "The teams are hard at work getting things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

It should be noted that these are problems of Facebook's making, not end users. The decision to require linked Facebook accounts to use the features on the Oculus created this problem. And, frankly, it was a decision that rendered no true benefit to the customer. Facebook made this move specifically so that it could track user behavior for advertising purposes, all under the guise of just how great and easy it is for Oculus users to be able to login with just a Facebook account. Yawn.

But, when Facebook found all of its platforms unreachable on October 4th, Oculus owners got the tangential screw-job.

Facebook says that today's extended outage did not compromise user data—it was actually a pretty boring networking error.

"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication, the company posted on its blog. "This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."

Services like a properly running and fully functional Oculus VR headset... for no reason other than Facebook greed. When you're very busy trying to make the claim that you aren't too big that you should be broken up, that you don't have too much control over the everyday lives of the public, or that you don't have too many tie-ins to daily life, well, this was not a good look.

Although, as I will never stop taking this victory lap on behalf of Karl Bode, it certainly was predictable.

Filed Under: bgp, downtime, oculus, vr
Companies: facebook

Hacked Facebook Users Forced To Buy $300 Oculus VR Headset Just To Talk To Customer Support

from the too-big-to-function dept

Back in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus, there were the usual pre-merger promises that nothing would really change. 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 after selling the company to Facebook for $2 billion. Facebook itself also promised that 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. Just about a year ago, 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.

Fast forward a year and things have been flipped a bit on their heads.

Facebook users who have their accounts hacked and subsequently locked say it's impossible to get anybody at Facebook support to even listen to them. There's no real customer support helpline, and like many places COVID has made customer service staffing harder than ever. There is apparently an online form you can use that requires you provide your driver's license and other data to unlock your account, but Facebook users say it's apparently less than useless:

"Instead, Facebook tells users to report hacked accounts through its website. The site instructs them to upload a copy of a driver's license or passport to prove their identities. But the people NPR spoke with said they had trouble with every step of this automated process and wish Facebook would offer a way to reach a real person. "I sent these forms in morning, noon and night, multiple times a day," Marsala said. "Nobody got back to me, not once."

But if you actually buy something from Facebook they actually at least try to care. So, following in the footsteps of some Reddit users, hacked Facebook users have been buying $300 VR headsets (then often returning them unopened) just to get help:

"I ultimately broke down and bought a $300 Oculus Quest 2," he said...Sherman contacted Oculus with his headset's serial number and heard back right away. He plans to return the unopened device, and while he's glad the strategy worked, he doesn't think it's fair.

"The only way you can get any customer service is if you prove that you've actually purchased something from them," he said."

Granted this probably won't work for long. And Facebook recently announced it was halting sales of the Oculus Quest 2 for now because the device's foam face plate was causing skin irritation for some people. Still, it shows that at the scale Facebook operates at, semi-consistent content moderation isn't the only thing the company finds impossible. Basic customer support for people locked out of their accounts at no fault of their own is also too much to ask. Which then again raises the question: if you can't function as a business at the scale Facebook operates, maybe you shouldn't exist at that scale.

Filed Under: customer service, oculus, vr
Companies: facebook

Learning About Content Moderation From Ghosts In Virtual Reality

from the ghosts-in-the-machine dept

Content moderation in virtual reality comes with its own unique challenges. What works for the moderation of text and video doesn’t neatly translate into VR. In late June, Facebook’s Horizon, a VR social space still in beta testing, released an update to prevent its blocking feature from creating ghosts. That might sound hyperbolic, but it is a perfectly apt description of the feature’s effect in Horizon prior to the update. In the earlier build, both the blocker and the blocked were made invisible to one another, but allowed to continue interacting with the same virtual world. While they couldn’t see one another, they could see each other’s effects on their shared environment. If someone blocked you, your obscene gestures might be invisible to them, but you could still move the furniture about and rattle chains – practically becoming a poltergeist.

Improvements to Blocking in Horizon

We’re beginning to roll out changes to how blocking works in Horizon. These changes are based on people’s feedback, and are designed to improve people’s experience and make Horizon a safer and more welcoming place.

Previously, when you blocked someone in Horizon, both you and the person you blocked became invisible to each other. We heard feedback from people that this was confusing, for example when the other person continued interacting with objects in the same space.

Now, both the person who has been blocked and the person who blocked them will be able to see each other’s username tag, while keeping their avatars invisible to each other. This update allows both people to know they’re present, but blocked and muted.

You’ll also be able to see the people you’ve blocked in your menu (such as in the People Nearby list) instead of them being completely hidden. This means you can see who you’ve blocked without having to interact with them. You can also visit the settings page and see a block list, where you can see people you’ve blocked and choose to unblock them if you want.

As the patch notes explain, when used in VR, the traditional approach to blocking caused unintended problems. Unlike static social media profiles, users embody their avatars. The user’s digital representation mimics their motions and gestures as it moves through a shared virtual world. On traditional social media, blocking another user hides your speech from their view and limits their ability to reply. Hiding your avatar from their view is a logical translation of this policy to virtual reality. However, because the invisible-to-one-another blocker and blocked still shared the same virtual world, a malicious user could potentially block someone to haunt them or spy unobserved. Tagging speech from blocked users would be unnecessary on traditional social media, as their speech is already excluded from the blocker’s conversations. However, in a shared virtual environment, it becomes a necessary component of a useful blocking feature.

While these are far from life-threatening abuses, they illustrate why best practices for traditional content moderation can’t always be easily applied to VR. In many ways, Facebook Horizon’s moderation challenges look more like those of a video game, especially a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), than those of a traditional social network. In both cases, players interact through avatars, and can simultaneously affect the same virtual world. In either a game or a shared VR world, the properties of the digital environment govern player interactions as much, if not more than, rules about players’ speech. This often introduces tradeoffs between antiharassment measures and realism or interactivity. If a game models fire realistically, a malicious player might kick a campfire into another’s tent and set it ablaze. This can be avoided by either limiting players’ ability to interact with fire (stopping them from kicking it), or the properties of the fire itself (preventing it from burning the tent). Environmental design choices in games or VR somewhat resemble architectural choices faced by traditional platforms - whether to create retweet or quote tweet functions, or to allow users to control who can reply to their tweets. However, creating an interactive virtual world requires making many more of these decisions.

MMOs are typified as either “theme park” or “sandbox” games. In the former, designers set fixed goals for players to compete or cooperate towards, justifying referee-like governance. The latter offers players a set of tools, and expects them to make their own fun, limiting the need for intercession by designers. Conflict between players with different goals is an expected part of the fun.

While platforms for knitting patterns or neighborhood conversation have purposes that recommend some rules over others, more open-ended platforms have struggled to justify their rules. YouTube is a home for video content. Which video content? Who’s to say? VR is, for the time-being, mostly used for gaming. However, as social and commercial applications of the technology become more popular, this question of purpose will become politically relevant, as it has for YouTube.

Horizon’s chief product is a framework for users to create their own virtual worlds. Horizon exists not to provide a Facebook designed environment, but to offer users the ability to create their own environments. This gives Horizon some guiding purpose, and relieves its designers of pressure to make one-size-fits-all decisions. Because most worlds within Horizon are created by users, these users can set the rules of interactivity. Facebook has neither the time nor the resources to govern the behavior and use of every virtual tennis racket across myriad virtual spaces. However, the creators of these little worlds know whether they’re creating a virtual tennis club or a garden party fighting game, and can set the rules of the environment accordingly. This will not be the first time Facebook finds that a rule that works for text and video publishing platforms falls flat in virtual reality. However, its response to the unintended effects of the block feature shows a willingness to appreciate the new demands of the medium.

Will Duffield is a Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute

Filed Under: blocks, content moderation, ghosts, oculus, virtual reality, vr
Companies: facebook

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