Hacked Facebook Users Forced To Buy $300 Oculus VR Headset Just To Talk To Customer Support
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 before taking his money and running toward the sunset. Among those promises was the promise 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.