Starting from today, Oculus is allowing you to log into Facebook from the Oculus Platform and access new social features.

With the move, Facebook wants to help people build their VR communities though social interactions using their Facebook identity. This, of course, will in turn allow Facebook to use Oculus data with the core Facebook data for advertisign purposes. The company has also updated the Oculus Privacy Policy to clarify that these social features are also provided by Facebook.

So, starting from today, users of the Oculus Platform are able to message their Oculus friends in or out of the headset with quick responses to hop into games together.

They can join their friends in VR directly from any device with links that open to where their friends are within an app, and see the most popular destinations where people are playing in VR.

Oculus users can also create Events, so they can organize meetups or multiplayer games with friends. Sharing photos, videos, and livestreaming to Facebook are also supported.

Users can hold parties that any of their Oculus friends can join (previously parties were only invite-only) and also Messenger friends can easily join them in VR when they send them links to join them where they’re playing.

As these changes roll out Facebook will ask people to log into Facebook from the Oculus Platform to use both the new social features above, as well as existing social features like joining parties, adding friends, and visiting other people’s Homes. These features are already powered by Facebook, since Oculus is part of the Facebook family of apps.

Whether you log into Facebook or not, you’ll still maintain a separate Oculus username, profile, and your existing Oculus friends. You can choose whether you want to add your Facebook friends as your Oculus friends automatically (depending on their settings), and you control who can see your Facebook real name on Oculus. You will always be able to choose what information you post to your Facebook profile or timeline, either by giving permission to post or by updating your privacy settings.

As part of these changes, Facebook will now use information about your Oculus activity, like which apps you use, to help provide these new social features and more relevant content, including ads. Those recommendations could include Oculus Events you might like to attend or ads for VR apps available on the Oculus Store. These changes won’t affect third-party apps and games, and they won’t affect your on-device data.

If you choose not to log into Facebook on Oculus, Oculus promises not to share data with Facebook to allow third parties to target advertisements to you based on your use of the Oculus Platform.

Oculus will have more new social features to share in the coming months, including more options to share to Facebook Groups and co-watching on Quest, as well as the launch of the Facebook Horizon beta in 2020.