Verizons new tracking tool tells advertisers when youre looking at your email inbox

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, and well-known programmer David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of the Ruby on Rails web application framework) called out Verizon on Twitter today for what Hansson calls an “Orwellian” ad placement tool.

(It should be noted Hansson is helping develop a privacy-focused email client called Hey through his company Basecamp, of which he is the...

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