Seriously, Facebook, Er, Meta?!?

At the end of December 2020 I was planning to purchase four Oculus Quest 2’s for students to use in my Science class and for esports. When I finally got the four quests in the spring of 2021 I ran into an obstacle that I thought would be easy to overcome – to make school accounts for the Quest 2 headsets, I needed to have Facebook accounts because the only way to log into the Oculus App and therefore the Quests was to login using a Facebook account. I didn’t think much of it at the time because many of my friends on Facebook have two or three accounts. Well, I was wrong.

Every single time I tried to create a Facebook account, every single time – and I tried over and over again – Facebook disabled my account. And every – single – time I would apply to have my account re-enabled and EVERY SINGLE TIME Facebook would disable my account, each and every account, PERMENANTLY disabled.

I tried with school Google email accounts. I tried with school Microsoft accounts. I tried with personal Google email accounts. I tried with personal Microsoft accounts. I tried using Chrome incognito mode. I tried using Firebox and Edge’s private browsing. I tried at school, at home, on different laptops and computers. I tried on my iPhone.

Finally, I found a strategy over the summer that finally worked! I purchased some IP addresses from a proxy website to make accounts outside my school and home IP addresses, in order to convince Facebook that was NOT me or any version of me they kept disabling permanently.

I used a different IP for each account and finally managed to create four Facebook accounts so that I could create four Oculus accounts! Four folks, just four. What are schools with dozens or even hundreds of Quests doing?? I can’t even imagine! Unless they had better luck than me! I still can’t believe the horrible luck I had – especially when I see people with multiple Facebook accounts!

After all that time I finally went ahead and started setting up my measly, four Quest 2’s. I ended purchasing some different apps than I had originally planned. Each quest has:

Beat Saber for esports
Echo VR for esports (this one was free)
Nature Treks for Science
Ocean Rift for Science
Star Chart for Science
Sculpt VR for Science
Tilt Brush for Science
Hand Physics Lab VR for Science
Gravity Lab for Science

So I took them to school Friday and was preparing the following handout for kids to use one table at a time (with other activity centers):

I finish getting the handout ready and read an email from a friend who mentions that Meta is no longer going to require Facebook for logging in to Oculus.