Verizon’s New Tracking Tool Tells Advertisers When You’re Looking at Your Email Inbox
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:
Verizon's new tracking tool tells advertisers when you're looking at your email inbox:
The company calls it 'View Time Optimization'
Verizon quietly introduced a new email marketing feature yesterday that it ominously calls "View Time Optimization," which is a fancy euphemism for a tracking tool that alerts advertisers to the moment you're looking at your email inbox. Why? So they can send you an ad, of course.
The service is part of Verizon's suite of email and web advertising properties, which includes AOL and Yahoo
[...] View Time Optimization is a play on the popular email marketing tool Send Time Optimization. That tool is not exclusively used by Verizon but by Mailchimp and countless other email marketing firms as well. It uses existing data gathered about an email user through their interactions with tracking pixels and other invasive yet near-universally used ad tech to know the best time to target you with an ad, which comes in the form of a new email that shows right up at the top of your inbox. Send Time Optimization basically knows when you're most likely to check your email, and it helps marketers time their ads appropriately.
[...] "It ensures emails appear close to the top of the inbox and thus it's improving the sender's open rates, click-through rates, and overall ROI of their email marketing campaign," writes Verizon product director Marcel Becker. "Email senders who have used VTO with their email campaigns saw increases in opens by 4x and clicks by 2x."
[...] "We genuinely believe that our mutual customers deserve a unique experience which connects them to their passions," Becker writes in the announcement. "We want to enable them to discover the things which matter to them. We want to enable them to get the most out of their inbox." He goes to say that "we believe that tracking our customers is wrong," and then follows that sentence up with, "But we also believe in the idea that they should be able to discover what is the most relevant to them."
It's shocking because Becker is acknowledging that tracking is wrong while at the same time admitting Verizon simply does not care because the value it provides to the advertisers that pay it to use these tools is greater than the potential privacy implications.
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