2017 - 2024 Tab Media news •
You know Vero, that new app everyone’s downloading? Yeah, it’s secretly very evil
Time to delete it like you did Uber
by Katie Way
Vero is the social media app that we expected to save us from the hell that is New Instagram — all your cool younger cousins are using it, so you should too. That's pretty much the whole marketing strategy. Plus, Vero actually has a chronological timeline, lets you control exactly who sees what you post and it doesn't have ads! Hallelujah, right?
Yeah, not so much. Users have a lot of problems actually using the app, for starters, because it spiked in popularity so quickly. It's been around since 2015, but didn't pick up steam until a few weeks ago.
Vero told Gizmodo that they're "currently experiencing intermittent technical issues due to extremely high traffic."
Some people on Twitter are also suspicious of the development team behind Vero, which is comprised entirely of Russian developers. Seems a little xenophobic to me, but I guess it's topical?
Others are concerned because once you post something on Vero, they claim the rights to reuse the content you've posted — but so do Twitter and Facebook, apparently, so that's that on that. They're also planning on implementing a paywall for users, which I for one am not interested in.
But it turns out that the app is more sinister than that…because the CEO behind it has a seriously fucked-up labor history.
According to the Daily Beast, Vero's founder and CEO Ayman Hariri's last gig was at as the deputy CEO of a construction company that treated its migrant workers so poorly the Saudi Arabian government had to intervene.
While Hariri was at the company, Saudi Oger, more than 31,000 workers filed suit against the company for unpaid wages. One worker from the Philippines even hanged himself, according to Bloomberg.
Workers also lived in deplorable conditions, according to a report by Reuters, forced to stay in labor camps with limited access to food, water and other resources while they waited to get paid for their work with Hariri's company.
If this information is enough to make you want to delete your account and ditch Vero for good, I'm sorry, but apparently it's not that easy — you can't just delete your account, you actually have to send in a request and hope that they accept. Good luck, suckers.