Nothing’s new “Lock Glimpse” feature delivers a rotating selection of wallpapers on the lock screen of the Phone (3a) Lite, but what’s bizarre is what happens when you click the attached link, because all of the content is from a strange website of clickbait farm websites.
“Lock Glimpse” first appeared recently on Phone (3a) devices in beta, but has made its formal debut on the Nothing Phone (3a) Lite. The feature, on by default on the Lite, shows rotating wallpapers that include a link to a piece of content related to that wallpaper.
It seems innocent enough, and just barely qualifies as a lock screen “ad,” but it opened up quite the rabbit hole.
The experience of opening up one of the articles linked in “Lock Glimpse” is reasonably simple. The article opens up and, after the content loads, you’ll also see ads appear. That’s the obvious play here, as those ads drive revenue for both Nothing and the partner that builds this content.
That partner is a company called “Vilykke” which, in our digging, seems to have no public-facing presence outside of showing up on these articles.
The articles themselves are completely impossible to interact with, too. You can’t share them, you can’t save the link for later, and there’s also very little value being provided. Most articles are either recipes, random DIY projects, or random information without any sourcing at all.
Put frankly, these articles seem to exist solely to get people to waste time and view ads.
In other words, Nothing’s phones are directing users to a clickbait farm. And this is a really bizarre clickbait farm, too.
“Vilykke” generates content on dozens of random websites, all with a collection of various bylines where none of the authors seem to have a presence outside of these websites. Some of the domains we found publishing this “Vilykke” content include:
- greenvibedaily.com
- iciclecrush.com
- h5.palmmobi.com
- kongfe.com
- econozi.com
- echovivid.com
- zestifylife.com
There are very likely more, but this is what we were able to uncover.
“Vilykke” itself also has no central website – at least not one that works, as “vilykke.com” isn’t functional – to explain this content, but all of the sites we found connected to this web of slop list a contact email address of “[email protected]” and also show a copyright notice starting in 2020. We reached out to that contact email address to ask for more information about the company – as well as to determine if AI is being used for the content because, well, that’s obviously what’s going on – and have yet to hear back.
As far as Nothing’s involvement, we asked the company about how it landed on this specific partner and were directed to the…
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