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Manila Bulletin

Ve Kareful with VKontakte

Ve Kareful with VKontakte

By manilabulletin_admin

By Noel Feria

Have you ever heard of VK?

VK.com, also known as VKontakte, is one of the top social media and networking platforms in Russia with about 450+ million user accounts. VK has similarities with Facebook but there are also differences with popular social media websites.

Weeks after the Facebook controversy and US Congress Hearing, some users around the world had already considered deactivating and deleting their Facebook accounts after realizing the privacy concerns on using it.

VK has been penetrating the social media landscape in the Philippines. Recently, some of President Duterte’s supporters had explicitly promoted to migrate to VK after Facebook announced its collaboration with Vera Files and Rappler for third-party fact-checking of news stories.

So should you shift to VK from Facebook then? Here are 5 points that you should take note or consider first:

The US and UK had issued joint warnings of possible Russian Cyber Attacks around 2 months ago. Most of Russians are already on the VK platform - now, do you really want to risk it?
Facebook and Google Integration with VK. Why connect it to Facebook and then risk your privacy? Did you know that Google has its own set of privacy controversies too?
As of April 2018, VK is No. 12 on the Top Free Apps on the iOS App Store and if you take a look on the PH App Store page of VK, there are not enough ratings or reviews to see.
Language barrier is definitely another thing to consider especially if you are not familiar with the Russian language.
Lastly, if you really want to at least try the platform, never input any personal data on it - you can always use a dummy name along with a dummy phone number and/or email account. When browsing their platform, you can check out and try to use Snitch when it comes to monitoring where your data goes and be cautious of possible malware on the content as well.

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