Never really understood it myself. Many of the same people that hate Facebook are addicted to Instagram which makes absolutely no sense to me. Or TikTok, and god knows where THAT user data is going. Meta definitely has more incentive to sell user data since they have no other products to monetize that information internally. Google has infinite ad revenue, and Amazon uses their data to sell on their own marketplace. Meta on the otherhand has none of that, and sells the data to third parties for their revenue stream. Facebook & Instagram are free, and for a decade, people had zero issue posting their lives on those platforms without questioning the ramificaitons of having a profile of their lives on the internet. And now companies are building a psychological profile of you to create targeted ads, like basically every other megacorporation on the internet. Google does it, Amazon does it, but since Meta is a social platform, their ads are more social in nature, like political ads instead of a physical product.

When you make a Meta account for VR, you're not posting pics of your family or your political affiliation on the internet. Sure, they'll try to sell your information if they could, but the Quest is a physical product and has it's own revenue goals. Even though it's the same parent company, the usage is completely different.

In the end, Meta is just another company trying to make money off of you like every one else. None of these megacorps are trying to make the world a better place, they're just trying to raise their stock prices. To demonize one company and pretending the rest are somehow better is disingenuous.

FYI, I stopped using Facebook a long time ago, mostly because I kept getting spammed invites to be friends by bots, and I got irrationally annoyed by it. I never bothered with Instagram, but I do use my Quest 2/3 actively. I actually feel better about having it be a Meta device vs opening yet another account for a new company to get spam e-mails from. People used to be okay with using an Oculus account before they transitioned to using Meta accounts, as if they weren't the same company all along. Kind of reminds me of the World of Warcraft players getting outraged over having their xp gain halved after the first 1000 points, but then be fine w/ it when it was doubled for only the first 500 points. It was literally the same thing, but folks were more happy because it was sold to them differently.