from the what-a-wicked-[world-wide-]web-we-weave-when-first-we-practice-to-deceive dept.
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 12 2020, @04:48AM
"Yeah, we know we're evil sons of bitches, but it pays well!"
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:06AM
Dang, the posts are all crap.
But whatever.
Marty, take care. Jan, despite your love for poe-fuck ( can't remember the name), take care of yoself and your wife.
Fnord, you are a limey, ain't you? Yus are in the same shitty boat as in America. Wash your fucking hands and keep you mask on.
As for me, Ive got restocked with pizza rollls. And chopped steak - I am trying to make philly cheesesteak and it ain't easy. I need a genuine italian rolls like Amaroso rolls, but I am afraid they are infected.
(Score: 2) by ataradov on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:23AM (4 children)
If you use e-mail from Verizon you kind of deserve it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:28AM (2 children)
I can't believe gmail hasn't been doing this already.
Personally. I'm happy running my own email and using a mail client and not a web browser to read mail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:39AM
It sounds just like something they would do, doesn't it?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ataradov on Sunday April 12 2020, @08:58PM
I just pay FastMail to provide me email. What a concept - paying for services you use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @10:27AM
I have an old verizon.net email address, and this might explain something that's been happening the last few months.
I use a mail client to access that verizon.net email (which these days goes through an AOL system, actually) instead of their web email page. Recently a lot of errors have been returned whenever my client tries to fetch email, but a retry or two and it goes through. Nothing has changed on my side to account for these errors... Sounds like they really want everyone to use their web page, so they can pop up more ads.
I have my own domain that I use for email now, but I keep the old verizon one around in case there's some odd place that I haven't converted over to using my new email address yet. Verizon did say we could use the address "forever", even when they merged email handling with AOL and even when they sold the Verizon DSL I had at the time to Frontier.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gtomorrow on Sunday April 12 2020, @07:36AM (2 children)
This is just nuts. When does this get classified by the "free" governments of the world as stalking [wikipedia.org]...because that's what it is.
At least when inviting a vampire at the door into your home, you pretty much know what to expect.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday April 12 2020, @04:41PM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @08:55PM
Citizen have the most important and powerful influence that the lobbyists don't, but they don't use it effectively.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @08:07AM
Gmail started it..
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 12 2020, @12:24PM
you never close your email? New messages just scroll into sight, and you only click the one you're interested in. The web mail server can't know when you're actually looking, until you interact with the window in some way. They only know that your computer is online, and accepting messages.
As for Gmail, I've had that address since the days when someone had to give you an invite. Gmail wasn't ubiquitous, it was something of a curiosity. I've checked my settings often enough, and I've turned off every tracking setting that I've been able to identify. Google's data on me is amazingly small, apparently because they honor all of those settings.
Alternatively, they don't permit me to see the data they have collected on me which I have denied permission to collect?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 12 2020, @12:54PM
Ignoring that I'm not using Verizon's mail services anyway, even if I were, they'd have a hard time to tell when I'm looking at my inbox. I'm pretty sure Thunderbird won't tell them. They would see when I fetch new mails, but as long as Thunderbird is running, that is a fixed repeating interval that is in no way related to when I look at the mail.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday April 12 2020, @01:38PM
"We genuinely believe that our mutual customers deserve a unique experience which connects them to their passions,"
This simple sentence fragment is just wonderful. It has all the elements I love about PR-speak. It's a type of refined mental filth, both virulent and effective and destroying logical thought processes in the unsuspecting host.
"We genuinely believe " - a bald-faced lie, also suggesting that they believe many things in an non-genuine way, which is probably true. A lie and a truth in just 3 words!
"deserve" - such a wonderful word. It usually implies some sort of morality system with enforced-fairness as a cornerstone.
"connects them to their passions" - Please, no, do not do this. Your average person goes to church on Sunday to violently suppress "their passions". Connecting them with these passions is probably a felony in most states.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @07:31PM
Why?
Because I run my own personal email server using my own domain that I've had for almost twenty years now.
I also read email using mutt, so no tracking pixels or any other html tracking crapola is activated for any email I receive.
No one (besides myself) knows when, or even if, I actually read any email they send.
Stop using corporate email systems that consider you a product to be sold to their true customers, the advertisers.
Start running your own email on your own server yourself, just like how the RFC's intended.
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Sunday April 12 2020, @10:42PM
Unfortunately we use Office 365 at work and received an email a month or two ago telling us that it could provide all our usage analytics, in something called MyAnalytics.
The headings in the report are Focus, Wellbeing, Network and Collaboration. How well do you score?
It seems to not only track time on email but also inspects your Outlook Calendar and interactions on Teams/Skype.