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Change is coming next year, but we don’t know how much
Facebook (which is now called Meta) knows a lot of virtual reality headset owners hate logging in with Facebook. Requiring Facebook logins created bad blood almost immediately and even accidentally locked some people out of their Quest VR hardware in late 2020. And at today’s Connect keynote, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted the restriction might be ending. But his comments raised more questions than they answered, and we still don’t know exactly what they mean.
Zuckerberg mentioned the changes while talking about work applications for VR. Here’s what he said:
“As we’ve focused more on work, and frankly as we’ve heard your feedback more broadly, we’re working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We’re starting to test support for Work Accounts soon, and we’re working on making a broader shift here within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a lot of people. Not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences, and I get that, especially as the metaverse expands. And I’ll share more about that later.”
Oculus Quest headsets — which will soon be known as Meta Quest headsets — have required a Facebook account since 2020. (Until the Quest 2’s release that year, users could choose to log in with either Facebook or a separate Oculus-branded account.) Some information gets shared across the services, and you’ll see Facebook social options in VR, although you can maintain separate user profiles and friends lists.
This choice was so controversial that it apparently helped inspire Meta’s rebranding. Zuckerberg told Stratechery’s Ben Thompson that the backlash added a sense of “urgency” to get Facebook’s name off the company as a whole. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth also noted the issue after Connect. “As we’ve heard feedback from the VR community more broadly, we’re working on new ways to log into Quest that won’t require a Facebook account, landing sometime next year. This is one of our highest priority areas of work internally,” Bosworth wrote in a Facebook post today.
But there’s a wide spectrum of possible changes that Meta could make, and only some of them would address critics’ underlying complaints.
Facebook has so far committed to one limited change: if you use the enterprise-oriented Quest for Business program, which will begin testing in the coming months, you’ll be able to sign in with Facebook’s recently announced Work Accounts system. Businesses had a similar option under the earlier Oculus for Business program, so this is more of a feature reshuffling than a practical advance.
Zuckerberg and Bosworth suggest that’s not the only change we’ll see, but Facebook is being cagey about the details. When I directly asked if users will be able to log into Quest headsets (or the Horizon “metaverse” platform) using something besides a personal Facebook account or a Facebook Work Account, a spokesperson only reiterated Zuckerberg’s statement.
Facebook’s “broader shift” could involve little more than renaming “Facebook accounts” to “Meta accounts” or “Horizon accounts.” And any version of it will probably ask you to hand some data to Facebook. But a more meaningful change could address a few major issues.
Meta is clearly aware of the critiques of its account policies. But based on executives’ statements so far, it could be months until we hear more about its plans for addressing them.
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