Virtual Reality users remember what happened after 2007 when FB introduced ads to its social platform and don't want any of that in the metaverse.

If you follow what's happening at CES this year you'll see it reached the point of absurdity. Everything has to be meta. In most cases these are blatant and obvious attempts to cash in on current trends but there are a lot of genuine use cases, mostly in the space of Virtual Reality. And that's where Facebook (now conveniently rebranding itself as "Meta") is hoping to cash in big.

Ever since Facebook’s acquisition in 2014 VR community keeps bringing up various grievances and fears and this latest move with Facebook changing its name is similarly looked upon with suspicion. To make long story short Oculus is already operating an ecosystem where Facebook logins are mandatory, terms and conditions allow for data surveillance, and a walled garden approach means all apps have to go through a stringent curation process before they are accepted into the store.

Given all of that, no wonder that the recent announcement from Andrew Bozworth that Oculus will now start putting ads inside VR was supposed to be as low key as possible.

Well that didn't work. In a now deleted Tweet Bozworth mentioned "We want to help developers generate revenue" and that they are "starting a small test of in-headset ads with a few developers" in the coming weeks. As restrained as this tweet sounds it immediately got picked up by users, retweeted, ratio'ed and amplified causing a lot of negative sentiment.

For many, allowing a centralized ad system foreshadows Facebook’s direction with its social media giant, where ads served as a gateway to more aggressive data-driven solutions down the road. Namely, targeted advertisement (so that ads generate more revenue) and attention economy ( so that users are incentivised to spend as much time connected as possible).

Bozworth’s initial tweet got ridiculed, social media quickly filled with memes and discussion boards were full of people venting their discontent. Angry gamers also took it to Oculus Store and review-bombed Blaston — one of the games that were supposed to be included in the initial ad rollout (as a result, Blaston since changed their mind and pulled out of the pilot, arguing ads may be a better fit for their other game Bait which is free to play).

But this growing backlash is not just limited to tweets and memes. Recent months have spawned a surprisingly large number of workarounds designed to countermeasure Facebook’s growing control over the VR ecosystem. Some are more symbolic than factual, but some actually work, allowing gamers to bypass the need to have a FB account. Bastian is one of such pioneers. Also known as Basti564, he is the author of an app called Oculess. His app allows users to disable telemetry: a protocol responsible for collecting and sending all the data to Facebook servers.

Another solution that came up a while ago is based on the idea of downgrading the companion app to one of the earlier versions (one that precedes mandatory FB logins). There was no Quest 2 at that time, but if users select Quest 1 instead, the headset will get unlocked anyway. It’s a good workaround for those that still have access to their original Oculus accounts (and didn’t merge it with Facebook). It allows them to buy games, play the ones they already owned and generally do anything you could do on Quest 1 with an unmerged account. Obviously less and fewer people have access to original Oculus accounts, and those who still do should be aware these accounts are set to expire on the 1st of January 2023, as per Facebook’s announcement.

Then there are developer accounts or test accounts as they’re called. By definition, these accounts are meant to aid developers in their work but can also be used by casual users without any problems. Test accounts retain core functionalities like Oculus TV, Oculus Browser, Air Link, and so on; however, they do not allow for any downloads or purchases from the Main Store. It’s an interesting workaround that’s quite flexible and easy to set up, but there’s no guarantee it will stay that way. Just like with original Oculus accounts, these test accounts can at some point be either phased out or require some sort of lengthy verification process.

Even with all this ingenuity, there are still many VR enthusiasts that are not happy with where this entire Metaverse things is going. That’s because these various workarounds are mostly meant to constrain Facebook in what it’s allowed to do with its users data, how much of that data they can collect, and so on, rather than preventing Facebook from identifying who the user is. They offer various degrees of increased privacy, not anonymity which cannot really be attained on Quest 2 unless maybe with a full root — something that’s not very likely to happen given the complexities of Oculus OS and the fact that a full root would turn Quest into a barebones hardware device with no initial functionalities.

So, for the time being, it seems we will continue to see this type of adversarial back and forth between the VR community and Meta Facebook, where we have certain announcements or implementations that seem to forward Facebook’s XR vision but go against the wishes of the community, and then a corresponding backlash as a result. Facebook is a dominant player in the VR space, so they have the last word, but it creates a sort of interesting dynamic where they have to thread a little bit more lightly and balance out their strategic objectives so that they don’t hurt Quest sales and VR adoption.