Meta equipped the Quest 2 with anti-piracy tools, but it won't force you to use them

Hey, you know what? 2023 is a great year to get into VR. Awesome headsets like the Quest 3 and the Vision Pro are just over the horizon and thanks to Apple, we’re seeing a boom of interest towards mixed-reality apps and tech.

But that doesn’t mean that the technology isn’t still relatively new. And as such, numerous must-have tools, like ones related to protection, are still being developed and implemented.

And one such API, namely the Platform Integrity Attestation, was released by Meta for the Quest 2. What does it do? Well, it’s basically there to help developers ensure that whoever is running their software is doing that on proper hardware and through a legitimate purchase.



Yeah, it’s an anti-piracy module. Sigh. Why the sigh? Well, because things like this have historically also had a negative impact on things such as performance. And because the existence of piracy means that we’re still in an era of inequality, but I digress.

There is one really, really cool thing about the PIA API (yes, I did that intentionally) and it is as follows: it’s not mandatory. Don’t want to use it? Well, it is your call whether to integrate it or not.

But if you do decide to make it a part of your release, you’ll be able to do the following through it:

• Secure device authentication
• Hardware-based app bans
• Protecting financial and enterprise app data
• External data misuse
• Include Anti-piracy measures

It’s truly awesome of Meta to make this a choice that the devs can make. Still the company is certainly thinking about its own ecosystem with this release, because sometimes Piracy may indicate malicious intent and that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

All we need to do now is wait and see if there will be any negative impact to performance or connection speed thanks to these checks. If not, then we’re already set for smooth sailing for the time being.