bredemarket

TikTok Uncertainty…Again Again

I wrote this post in April.

And now the TikTok sale deadline was extended again.

Should I just set this to auto-repost every 90 days?

And yes, Luna—I mean Celina—has talked about the possible latest extension. And will probably discuss it again 90 days from now.

(She’s Tidied Up and) I Can’t Find Anything

A wombat holding a phone displaying a digital identity, surrounded by papers with pictures of cars. Two Dolby speakers are in the back of the room.

Are you having trouble finding an asset such as a digital identity or a commercial asset? If you are, there are ways to make things easier to find.

An example from the identity world

Identity Jedi David Lee recently shared his thoughts on “The Hidden Cost of Bad Identity Data (and How to Fix It).” Lee didn’t focus on the biometric data, but instead on the textual data that is associated with a digital identity.

“Let’s say you’re kicking off a new identity program. You know you need user location to drive access policies, governance rules, or onboarding flows. But your authoritative source has location data in five different formats—some say “NY,” others say “New York,” and some list office addresses with zip codes and floor numbers.

“You tell yourself: “We’ll clean it up later.”

“What you’ve really done is commit your future self to a much more expensive project.”

Garbage in, garbage out.

An example from the commerce world

Krassimir Boyanov of KBWEB Consult provides another example of a problem in his post “Why AEM Assets Smart Tagging Makes Your Marketing Work Easier.” Let’s say that you’re managing the images (the “assets”) that display on a company’s online website. You have thousands if not millions of images to manage. How do you find a particular image?

One way to do this is to “tag” each image with descriptive information.

But if you do it wrong, there will be problems.

“Tagging is inconsistent. If 10 people are tagging the items, the tags will probably be inconsistent. While one person tags an item as a “car,” another may tag a similar item as an “automobile.” Although the two assets are similar, this is hidden because of inconsistent tag use.”

Again, garbage in, garbage out.

An organizational solution from the identity world

Lee and Boyanov approach these similar problems from two perspectives.

Lee, as an Identity and Access Management (IAM) expert, approaches this as a business problem and offers the following recommendations (among others):

“Clean early, not late: Push for authoritative sources to normalize and codify the data before it hits the IAM system….

“Push accountability upstream: Don’t accept ownership of fixing problems you don’t control. Instead, elevate the data issue to the right stakeholder (hint: HR, IT, or Legal).”

While Lee can certainly speak to the technologies that can normalize and codify the data, he prefers in this post to concentrate on the organizational issues that cause dirty data, and on how to prevent these issues from reoccurring in the future.

A technological solution from the commerce world

Boyanov can also speak to business and organizational issues as an Adobe Experience Manager consultant who has helped multiple organizations implement the Adobe product. But in this case he concentrates on a technological approach offered by Adobe:

A Taxonomy is a system of organizing tags based on shared characteristics, which are usually hierarchical structured per organizational need. The structure can help finding a tag faster or impose a generalization.
Example: There is a need to subcategorize stock imagery of cars. The taxonomy could look like:

/subject/car/
/subject/car/sportscar
/subject/car/sportscar/porsche
/subject/car/sportscar/ferrari
…
/subject/car/minivan
/subject/car/minivan/mercedes
/subject/car/minivan/volkswagen
…
/subject/car/limousine
…

Once the taxonomy is defined, assets can be tagged (preferably automatically) in accordance with the hierarchy.

Presumably David Lee’s identity world can similarly come up with a method to standardize addresses BEFORE they are added to an IAM system.

As deep as any ocean

Whether you’re dealing with a digital identity or a commercial asset, you need to ensure that you can find this asset in the future. This requires planning beforehand.

And a content creation project also requires planning beforehand, such as asking questions before beginning the project.

If you are an identity/biometric or technology firm that requires content creation, or perhaps proposal or analysis services, Bredemarket can help. After all, content creation is science…and art.

Talk to me: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/

CPA

Deep Deepfakes vs. Shallow Shallowfakes

We toss words around until they lose all meaning, like the name of Jello Biafra’s most famous band. (IYKYK.)

So why are deepfakes deep?

And does the existence of deepfakes necessarily mean that shallowfakes exist?

Why are deepfakes deep?

The University of Virginia Information Security explains how deepfakes are created, which also explains why they’re called that.

“A deepfake is an artificial image or video (a series of images) generated by a special kind of machine learning called “deep” learning (hence the name).”

UVA then launches into a technical explanation.

“Deep learning is a special kind of machine learning that involves “hidden layers.” Typically, deep learning is executed by a special class of algorithm called a neural network….A hidden layer is a series of nodes within the network that performs mathematical transformations to convert input signals to output signals (in the case of deepfakes, to convert real images to really good fake images). The more hidden layers a neural network has, the “deeper” the network is.”

Why are shallowfakes shallow?

So if you don’t use a multi-level neural network to create your fake, then it is by definition shallow. Although you most likely need to use cumbersome manual methods to create it.

In injection attack detection, no fakery of the image is necessary. You can insert a real image of the person.

For presentation attack detection (liveness detection, either active or passive), you can dispense with the neural network and just use old fashioned makeup.

Or a mask.

It’s all semantics

In truth, we commonly refer to all face, voice, and finger fakes as “deep” fakes even when they don’t originate in a neural network.

But if someone wants to refer to shallowfakes, it’s OK with me.

KYG, Know Your Government (ICE, CBP, SBCSD, USPS)

Two unrecognizable people driving a white van on a street lined with palm trees.

I recently cited my 30 years of experience in selling to governments by using the acronym B2G (business to government). This confused the person I was talking to, who had heard of B2B (business to business) but not B2G.

By the same token, you have KYB (know your business) and KYG (know your government).

Two recent incidents in Southern California indicate that some of us are pretty bad at KYG.

El Pendón Estrellado

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the news, a lot of people in Southern California and elsewhere are talking about a portion of the Department of Homeland Security called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Not to be confused with the Queen – David Bowie fan.

I won’t get into the details about why people are paying attention to ICE right now, but let’s just say that when ICE shows up, a crowd gathers.

And that’s what happened at Dodger Stadium this morning when some white vans showed up at the Dodger Stadium parking lot. The Dodgers stated that ICE agents came to Dodger Stadium and that the Dodgers denied them access.

Except that it apparently wasn’t ICE, but Customs and Border Protection, another part of the Department of Homeland Security.

“‘This had nothing to do with the Dodgers. CBP vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement,’ Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.”

The Dodgers may be sensitive about things at the moment, since they apparently attempted to persuade Nezza NOT to sing the National Anthem in Spanish recently.

San Ber’dino

But it isn’t just people in Chavez Ravine that assume that white van equals ICE. Take my county, San Bernardino County. Or as former county resident Frank Zappa put it, San Ber’dino.

Recently the Sheriff’s Department made a statement.

[The] department is sending a message to the community following two incidents involving white department vehicles that it says were “targeted” after being mistaken for Immigration and Customs Enforcement units.

“All white vehicles are NOT ICE,” read Thursday’s post on the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s X account….

“We have had two incidents of our sheriff’s department personnel targeted while driving our unmarked units and in one case they were run off the road,” the post reads.

With so many agencies providing law enforcement and homeland security services, it’s understandable that some people could get confused about exactly which agency is at their door. ICE? CBP? The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department (SBCSD)?

Don’t forget that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) also uses white vans (although they’re marked).

So if you’re not careful, the white van that you block may not be trying to send people to El Salvador, but instead may be trying to deliver your Amazon shipment.

HP Instant Ink Users and Identity: 1:1 Person-to-NPE Binding Isn’t Always Enough

How many people should use a SaaS service? If your answer is “only one,” you don’t need to read this post.

Last month I discussed a particular use case in which AI-based non-person entities (NPEs) were bound to the identities of carbon-based life forms. My post “Identity-Bound Non-Person Entities” reviewed the partnership between Anonybit and SmartUp.

This binding doesn’t need artificial intelligence to work. The NPE may be something as simple as a service.

But how many people can be bound to an NPE?

A company and its service

There is a very large technology company; I won’t reveal the company name, but its initials are HP. And this very large company provides a service; I won’t reveal the service name, but it instantly provides ink for the company’s printers…

Never mind. It turns out that I already discussed HP Instant Ink (Ink as a Service) in the Bredemarket blog before. Plus, the company providing IaaS is no longer known as “the Hewlett-Packard Company,” but as “HP Inc.” So much for my attempts at obfuscation.

The 1:1 binding between me and Instant Ink

Anyway, we did sign up for Instant Ink when we purchased a new printer. Specifically, my HP account was registered as the owner of our Instant Ink account.

(Those of you with a keen eye can already see where this is going.)

As part of the Instant Ink service that we purchased, I can obtain two things:

1. The status of Instant Ink shipments to us

Not that these shipments are all that fast.

So far we have encountered two instances in which we ran out of ink before the new Instant Ink shipment arrived.

And when you put a regular ink cartridge into the printer while waiting for the Instant Ink shipment, HP sends a nasty gram stating that I put the wrong ink in the printer, and to put Instant Ink in the printer right now.

Um, my Instant Ink is in Pennsylvania, and it will take 10 days to reach California. What am I supposed to do, fly to Pennsylvania and get it?

2. HP support

For our printer, I can obtain support from HP. I will have more to say about HP support later.

First person…or people

Do all of you see the issue now? If not, let me spell it out.

I am married, and my wife and I bought the printer together. But she has no access to shipment tracking or support; only I do.

Actually, I must confess that I gave her my HP login and password. So she has access to the shipment tracking information. But since her name is not John, we assumed that HP would never talk to her about the Instant Ink service that we purchased.

There is something in the (so-called) HP Smart App that allows me to “invite” someone to the printer. But when I tried to “invite” my wife, HP briefly flashed a message saying that I could not invite my wife because she already had an HP personal account.

I need support

By this time I had piled up 3 support requests for HP:

How can I get new Instant Ink before my old Instant Ink runs out?
How can my wife see information on our Instant Ink service?
Plus there’s a third one regarding multiple HP accounts that I won’t get into here.

I decided to tackle the second support request first. So I found the support page, started a gust, and got a ticket number.

The first support chat

I was routed to a printer specialist, who informed me that they couldn’t help me and routed me to an Instant Ink specialist.

The Instant Ink person asked for the error code that appeared when I tried to “invite” my wife. I explained that I didn’t know because it disappeared so quickly.

So I tried to invite my wife again, pointing my smartphone camera at the laptop screen so that I could take a picture of the error code the…um…instant that it appeared.

I successfully took the picture, and there was no error code. Just a message saying that I couldn’t invite my wife because she already had an HP personal account. And to contact support.

The Instant Ink specialist instructed me to click on a link, then closed the support ticket.

I clicked on the link…and was asked to create a new support ticket.

The second support chat

I was routed to a printer specialist, who informed me that they couldn’t help me and routed me to an Instant Ink specialist.

(Yes, there’s a lot of repetition in this post.)

By this time I tried to boil my request down to a simple question: how can my wife see Instant Ink shipment status and request support on her own?

The Instant Ink specialist went quiet for a while, and finally—over an hour after I started the initial support chat—provided the solution to my problem.

Give my wife my HP login and password. And sure, she’ll have no problem contacting support, even though I’m the named user.

Suffice it to say that I was not pleased.

A systemic problem

But to be fair, none of the 4 support people I talked to could have solved my problem.

Because HP has made the underlying assumption that its Instant Ink service can only be managed by one person, not two.

And HP is not alone in this. There are multiple services that assume single person management. This affects married couples often, where one spouse is the named user for a service but knows nothing about it because spouse 2 handles it.

This results in a number of conversations like this:

SERVICE: John?

WIFE: No, this is his wife.

SERVICE: I need John’s authorization to continue.

WIFE: (carries phone to me in the Bredemarket world headquarters) Amazing and wonderful husband, could you authorize me to discuss our account?

(Some portions of this conversation may have been fictionalized.)

ME: Hello, this is John.

SERVICE: John, what is your date of birth?

This is not a technology issue, but an organizational issue. Except where laws (such as HIPAA) regulate this, an organization should allow multiple people to be assigned to a service or other NPE.

It would make my—I mean our lives easier.

NFI is Charged Up

(Imagen 4)

It’s been over three years since I mentioned NFI Industries in the Bredemarket blog. At the time I said:

“NFI is working with Volvo, Daimler, and others on an ambitious project to “[o]perate the first 100% zero-emission drayage fleet in the U.S. with the deployment of 60 battery-electric tractors.” NFI wants to achieve this by 2023.”

Well, now it’s 2025, and NFI has nearly 90 battery-electric tractors. And a place to charge them:

“NFI and Prologis Mobility launched a new electric truck charging depot in Ontario, California. The 1 MW facility features 10 dedicated charging ports and charges up to 20 vehicles daily.”

Biometric Marketers: What About WRITER Personas?

(Imagen 4)

Biometric marketing leaders already know that I’ve talked about reader personas to death. But what about WRITER personas? And what happens when you try to address ALL the reader and writer personas?

Reader personas

While there are drawbacks to using personas, they are useful in both content marketing and proposal work when you want to tailor your words to resonate with particular types of readers (target audiences, or hungry people).

I still love my example from 2021 in which a mythical Request for Proposal (RFP) was issued by my hometown of Ontario, California for an Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS). The proposal manager had to bear the following target audiences (hungry people) in mind for different parts of the proposal.

The field investigators who run across biometric evidence at the scene of a crime, such as a knife with a fingerprint on it or a video feed showing someone breaking into a liquor store.
The examiners who look at crime scene evidence and use it to identify individuals.
The people who capture biometrics from arrested individuals at livescan stations.
The information technologies (IT) people who are responsible for ensuring that Ontario, California’s biometric data is sent to San Bernardino County, the state of California, perhaps other systems such as the Western Identification Network, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The purchasing agent who has to make sure that all of Ontario’s purchases comply with purchasing laws and regulations.
The privacy advocate who needs to ensure that the biometric data complies with state and national privacy laws.
The mayor (Paul Leon back in 2021, and still in 2025), who has to deal with angry citizens asking why their catalytic converters are being stolen from their vehicles, and demanding to know what the mayor is doing about it.
Probably a dozen other stakeholders that I haven’t talked about yet, but who are influenced by the city’s purchasing decision.

Writer personas

But who is actually writing the text to address these different types of readers?

Now in this case I’m not talking about archetypes (a topic in itself), but about the roles of the subject matter experts who write or help write the content.

I am currently working on some internal content for a Bredemarket biometric client. I can’t reveal what type of content, but it’s a variant of one of the 22 types of content I’ve previously addressed. A 23rd type, I guess.

Anyway, I am writing this content from a product marketing perspective, since I am the self-proclaimed biometric product marketing expert. This means that the internal content fits into a story, focuses on the customer, highlights benefits, and dwells on the product.

But what would happen if someone in a role other than product marketing consultant wrote this content?

An engineer would emphasize different things. Maybe a focus on the APIs.
A finance manager would emphasize different things. Maybe an ROI focus.
A salesperson may focus on different things. Maybe qualification of a prospect. Or eventually conversion.

So the final content is not only shaped by the reader, but by the writer.

You can’t please everyone so you’ve got to please yourself

With all the different reader and writer personas, how should you respond?

Do all the things?

Perhaps you can address everyone in a 500 page proposal, but the internal content Bredemarket is creating is less than 10 pages long.

Which is possibly already too long for MY internal target audience.

So I will NOT create the internal content that addresses the needs of EVERY reader and writer persona.

Which is one truth about (reader) personas in general. If you need to address three personas, it’s more effective to create 3 separate pieces than a single one.

Which is what I’m doing in another project for this same Bredemarket biometric client, this one customer-facing.

And the content targeted to latent examiners won’t mention the needs of Paul Leon.

In which I address the marketing leader reader persona

So now I, the biometric product marketing expert writer persona, will re-address you, the biometric marketing leader reader persona.

You need content, or proposal content.

But maybe you’re not getting it because your existing staff is overwhelmed.

So you’re delaying content creation or proposal responses, or just plain not doing it. And letting opportunities slip through your fingers.

Plug the leaks and stop your competitors from stealing from you. Bring Bredemarket on board. Schedule a free exploratory meeting today at https://bredemarket.com/cpa/.

CPA

Bredemarket’s “CPA.”

Applying Common Sense to Employment Fraud

Jobseekers need to know their potential employer when something about a job opportunity doesn’t feel right. And there are ways to do that.

Trusting the person who says to trust your gut

I’ve previously talked about how common sense can minimize the chances of being fooled by a deepfake.

But common sense can help prevent other types of fraud such as employment fraud, as noted by Rachel Lund, chief risk officer with Sandia Area Federal Credit Union.

“Trust your gut- if it feels off, it probably is.”

But can we trust Lund?

Using search engines for employment fraud scam research

Let’s look at another tip of hers:

“Research the company: Google “[Company Name] + Scam” and see if anything comes up.”

Although you can use Bing. Google isn’t the only search engine out there.

So I entered “Sandia Area Federal Credit Union Scam” into Bing…and found out about its warnings about scams.

As far as Bing is concerned, Scandia Area Federal Credit Union is not a scammer itself.

But Bing (and Google) are old fashioned dinosaurs.

Using generative AI for employment fraud scam research

So I clicked on the tab for Copilot results. (ChatGPT isn’t the only generative AI tool out there.)

Well, it’s good to know that a regulated credit union isn’t a scammer.

So credit unions are fine

But what about something with a slightly sleazier reputation…like stuffing envelopes?

OK, Copilot isn’t hot on envelope stuffing opportunities.

So envelope stuffing isn’t fine

But what if we get personal?

TL;DR: “That’s not us.”

Know your business. Know your employer.