Although the Vero application was launched in 2015, it became the first user talk on social networking sites in the last week of February. The relationship between this app and its users is still somewhat ambiguous. After a crazy spate of app stores, campaigns to delete it began, against the background of principles and ethics linked to its chief executive, Ayman al-Hariri.
What is Vero?
Social networking users praised Vero's application as the "new instagram". The application launched in 2015 aims to radically change how people interact with each other on social networking platforms, according to a statement posted on their Web site.
The application is similar to the InStream application, but is a free ad experience. It allegedly does not include "data mining algorithms", such as "aggressive" data collection techniques from sites such as Facebook. Vero collects only data that is necessary and ensures the security of user accounts, according to the same statement.
It also allows users to suggest and share music, movies, books, as well as links and places that can be categorized.
One of the most prominent features of this application is that users can identify and choose who can and can not access their publications, by rating followers, based on the relationships that bring them together on the ground.
The rise of "Vero"
The iTunes App Store is released in the United States on February 26. On the 27th of the same month, the application was ranked 301th on the charts.
The application had stated that it would waive the annual subscription fee for the first million people who carried it. After that, users will pay a "small annual fee" according to the application's location.
It is not clear exactly what led to the rise of this remarkable Vero, but the new changes in the algorithms of the Facebook and Instagram sites have confused their users and contributed to the increase in the number of users of the new app in a crazy way.
The insane demand for Firefox has sometimes slowed the application, and some users complained of problems such as overloaded servers.
Vero operates approximately 30 employees in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, according to the current chief executive officer in Italy.
Who is Ferro CEO?
CEO of Ferro, the owner of the application, is the Lebanese brother of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and the son of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005 when Hariri was a resident of the United States. In Computer Science from Georgetown University.
His net worth is estimated at $ 1.33 billion, according to Forbes.
After the assassination of his father, Ayman al-Hariri returned to Saudi Arabia to contribute to the management of Saudi Oger, founded by the late Prime Minister, and left in 2013. According to Bloomberg, Saudi Oger has undertaken large projects such as The Ritz-Carlton Riyadh and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology on the Red Sea coast and power plants associated with Saudi Aramco.
But in September 2017, Bloomberg reported that Saudi Oger had been closed because of mismanagement. The Saudi Waller Journal last November reported the closure of Saudi Oger and said it closed its business in Saudi Arabia last summer after Saudi Arabia's royal family cut spending on luxury construction projects.
The newspaper cited former employees of the company as saying it relied on the Saudi government - the main customer - to pay millions of dollars in wages owed to its former employees, and that Saudi officials were investigating their money. The newspaper pointed out that the problems experienced by the company reflected the influence exercised by the Saudi authorities on Saad Hariri, as well as on Lebanon itself.
The Saudi Oger employs about 40,000 workers from 30 nationalities and has the largest real estate projects in Saudi Arabia along with bin Laden. The company began to suffer, at the end of 2014, from financial problems amounting to the inability to pay workers' salaries. The company's problems were linked to the collapse of oil prices and the worsening of the deficit of the Saudi treasury, forcing Riyadh to stop large-scale construction projects, including projects assigned to the "Saudi Oger".
Campaign against "Vero"
Vero users expressed a lack of confidence in the new CEO of Instagram, in solidarity with thousands of former Saudi Oger employees. They launched a campaign against Vero and demanded that the application be deleted from mobile phones for "ethical reasons".
In the same vein, the New York magazine pointed out that the application pulls the user's personal information (phone numbers and e-mail addresses) without requiring them to use their real names, which opens the door wide open to the establishment of fictitious accounts. Technology experts are also concerned about the company's ambiguity about what it does with user data, according to DailyBest.
The company's close relations with Russia (the Russian developers' team and the Hariri family's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin) have raised the concerns of experts in the field, especially as Russia is accused of using social networking platforms to influence the US presidential election in 2016