Facebook halts Oculus Quest sales in Germany amid privacy concerns

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Facebook)

Facebook subsidiary Oculus says it has "temporarily paused" sales of Oculus Quest headsets to customers in Germany. Reports suggest the move is in response to concerns from German regulators about the recently announced requirement that all Oculus users will need to use a Facebook account by 2023 to log in to the device.

"We have temporarily paused selling Oculus devices to consumers in Germany," Facebook writes in a brief message on the Oculus support site. "We will continue supporting users who already own an Oculus device and we're looking forward to resuming sales in Germany soon."

Facebook declined an opportunity to provide additional comment to Ars Technica. But in a statement to German News site Heise Online (machine translation), the company said the move was due to "outstanding talks with German supervisory authorities... We were not obliged to take this measure, but proactively interrupted the sale."

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