Verizon’s new tracking tool tells advertisers when you look at your email inbox

Verizon quietly introduced a new email marketing feature yesterday that ominously calls “View Time Optimization,” which is a nice euphemism for a tracking tool that alerts advertisers when you look at your email inbox. Why? So of course they can send you an advertisement.

The service is part of Verizon’s suite of email and web advertising features, including AOL and Yahoo, and renowned programmer David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of the Ruby on Rails programming language) called Verizon on Twitter today for what Hansson calls an “Orwellian” ad placement tool.

(It should be noted that Hansson helps develop one privacy-focused email client called Hey through his company Basecamp, of which he is co-founder and chief technology officer alongside chief exec Jason Fried.)

View Time Optimization is a game of the popular email marketing tool Send Time Optimization. That tool is not used exclusively by Verizon, but also by Mailchimp and countless other email marketing companies. It uses existing data collected from an email user through their interactions with tracking pixels and other invasive but almost universally used ad technology to know the best time to target you with an ad delivered in the form of a new one email that will immediately appear at the top of your inbox. In fact, delivery time optimization knows when you’re likely to check your email, and it helps marketers time their ads appropriately.

However, the Verizon version goes a step further and follows people in their AOL or Yahoo email client to send the ad “when users are actively working on their inboxes.” If it appears at that time, the data indicates that someone is likely to open the message earlier.

“It makes emails appear almost at the top of the inbox, thereby improving the open rates, clickthrough rates and overall ROI of their sender email marketing campaign,” writes Product director Verizon Marcel Becker. “Email senders who used VTO in their email campaigns saw the increase in openings by 4x and clicks by 2x.”

Of course, Becker wouldn’t be a good marketer, or a Verizon employee model, if he hadn’t used this product as a benefit to both advertisers and consumers. This is where Hansson’s Orwellian descriptor is best suited.

“We truly believe that our mutual customers deserve a unique experience that connects them to their passions,” Becker writes in the announcement. “We want to enable them to discover what is important to them. We want them to get the most out of their inbox. He says that “we believe that following our customers is wrong,” and then follows up on that phrase, “But we also believe in the idea that they should be able to discover what is most relevant to them.”

It’s shocking because Becker acknowledges that tracking is wrong while admitting that Verizon just doesn’t care because the value it offers to the advertisers who pay to use these tools outweighs the potential privacy impact.

Of course, pretty much every email client on the market, including Gmail and other popular services, aggressively tracks its users, collects and stores its data, then sells people’s inbox and content messages to advertisers. That’s because these products are generally free, and the companies they earn make money by amassing a large user base of largely apathetic consumers and then monetizing that user base through advertising. There are paid services for people who want more privacy, including ProtonMail and the recently released OnMail. But companies like Verizon accurately assume that most people don’t care enough and will accept invasive ads in exchange for a free product.

Still, View Time Optimization seems like a whole new level of tracking, and there are many critical, unanswered questions about how this ad technology works – the most important thing is whether Verizon email users can opt out. Other relevant issues include whether this tool notifies marketers immediately when someone is at their computer and whether location data has been recorded; how much of this tool is automated or how much manual intervention a human can take; and what kind of database of information is collected and stored about the habits of email users.

Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.