Perhaps you’ve heard the joke about an anonymous survey managed by a company’s personnel department. In the joke, one employee received two emails:
The first was from HR, announcing the anonymous survey.
The second was from the employee’s supervisor, reporting that HR says that the employee is the only person who hasn’t completed the “anonymous” survey.
But maybe it’s not a joke.
Is the zero knowledge/World dream of one unique identity per person actually a curse? According to Biometric Update, Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum fame claims it REMOVES privacy.
“[U]nder one-per-person ID, even if ZK-wrapped, we risk coming closer to a world where all of your activity must de-facto be under a single public identity….
“[T]here can’t be an easily legible hard limit on how many identities you can easily get. If you can only have one identity, you do not have pseudonymity, and you can be coerced into revealing it.”
Buterin believes multiple identities, managed separately, provide concurrent identity and privacy.
I’ve spent a ton of time discussing naughty people who use technology to create deepfakes—including voice deepfakes—to defraud people.
But some deepfakes don’t use technology, and some deepfakes are not intended to defraud.
Take Mark Hamill’s impersonation of fellow actor Harrison Ford.
Mark Hamill as Harrison Ford, and Harrison Ford reacting to Mark Hamill.
And then there was a case that I guess could be classified as fraud…at least to Don Pardo’s sister-in-law.
Don Pardo was originally known as an announcer on NBC game shows, and his distinctive voice could be heard on many of them, including (non-embeddable) parodies of them.
With his well-known voice, NBC jumped at the chance to employ him as the announcer for the decidedly non-game television show Saturday Night Live, where he traded dialogue with the likes of Frank Zappa.
“I’m the Slime.”
Except for a brief period after he ran afoul of Michael O’Donoghue, Pardo was a fixture on SNL for decades, through the reigns of various producers and executive producers.
Until one night in 1999 when laryngitis got the best of Don Pardo, and the show had to turn to Bill Clinton.
No, not the real Bill Clinton.
I’m talking about the SNL cast member who did a voice impression of Bill Clinton (and Jeopardy loser Sean Connery), Darrell Hammond. Who proceeded to perform an impression of Don Pardo.
An impression that even fooled Don Pardo’s sister-in-law.
This is Don Pardo saying this is Don Pardo…
Pardo continued to be Saturday Night Live’s announcer for years after that, sometimes live from New York, sometimes on tape from his home in Arizona.
And when Pardo passed away in 2014, he was succeeded as SNL’s announcer by former cast member Darrell Hammond.
This scene is incredibly inaccurate. A teenage Napoleon was NOT looking on as George Washington presented a copy of the Declaration of Independence to King George III during the Treaty of Paris negotiations in 1783.
But at least Napoleon was in France in September 1783, presumably at the military academy at Brienne-le-Château, 125 miles east of Paris (the kilometer hadn’t been adopted yet). Napoleon was bullied at the academy for his short stature and poor French (his native tongue was Corsican), but he would show them.
King George was certainly not in France in 1783, since he rarely traveled far from London.
General George (not yet President) was headquartered with his troops in New Jersey, based at the house known as Rockingham.
The actual U.S. negotiators in Paris were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens (who had been released from the Tower of London).
But at least the two Georges picture is more accurate than my picture of Thomas Jefferson eating a hot dog as a baseball game was played nearby.
Tommy.
I will talk about the Declaration of Independence, in a content marketing context, later this week. On Wednesday, of course.
Odd, I thought. Not sure why a fingerprint device company would write stuff like this:
“AI Agent based automation could be the key to overcoming the bottlenecks in content creation and distribution. As a CEO, I am constantly seeking ways to optimize our operations, and this seemed like a promising avenue. The idea of automating content amplification intrigued me, especially considering the potential time savings and efficiency gains.”
Then I saw the author: “MIA.” (All caps.)
“MIA is CloudApper’s sales and solutions assistant, designed to help professionals and business leaders explore the future of workforce technology. MIA shares insights from real-world conversations with customers and CloudApper experts-bridging the gap between AI innovation and practical enterprise solutions.”
I subsequently discovered that CloudApper was co-founded by the same person who co-founded M2SYS.
So apparently CloudApper is publishing its posts on the M2SYS website.
Which led me to question: is M2SYS still a biometric concern?
I checked news articles, and the most recent mentions of the company are from so-called research reports of dubious value. Here’s the blurb for a 2021 report.
“The Key Players of the Global AFIS Market are 3M Cogent, Inc. (U.S.), Safran Identity & Security (U.S.), NEC Corporation (Japan), M2SYS Technology (U.S.), Afix Technologies Inc (U.S.), Biometrics4ALL (U.S.), Fujitsu (Japan), Cross Match Technologies, Inc. (U.S.), HID Global Corporation (U.S.), M2SYS Technology (U.S.).”
“American Green’s new AGM Beverage Vendor is an age-restricted vending machine to dispense beer and spirits, powered by finger vein biometric technology from M2SYS.”
And the aforementioned M2SYS blog has not used the “biometric” tag since March 2023.
But hey…they sure do have a lot of blog content.
But is it relevant?
If your identity/biometric company needs RELEVANT blog content…contact me by visiting https://bredemarket.com/cpa/.
June 2025 is almost over, so I can evaluate my performance against my goal.
Did I focus? Somewhat, both in my professional and my personal life.
Did I achieve ubiquity? Nope. But the blog has enjoyed record impressions and visitors. And would have achieved more if I hadn’t run afoul of the search engine gatekeepers.
Did I improve Bredemarket’s “capabilities to serve you”? Yes.
“If you want to use your driver’s license to fly, you’ll need a REAL ID. If you don’t have one yet, your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is the place to go, and they’re only taking in-person appointments.”
The FTC is attempting to warn against scammers who claim to offer REAL ID services and then defraud you.
“During the online REAL ID application process, you will be prompted to upload documents that prove identity (e.g., valid passport or birth certificate) and residency (e.g., utility bill, bank statement).”
But you can’t do EVERYTHING online.
“Uploading images of these documents online will save you time when you visit the DMV office to complete your application so don’t skip this step. Bring the original documents submitted online to your REAL ID appointment.”
But whatever you do, don’t upload your documents to “the-real-id dot cn.”
Bredemarket hasn’t used paid advertising in years, but I recently ran a small ad for 4 days using Blaze, as offered by WordPress.
Even though Blaze was too broad for me to accurately specify my target audience.
Because most U.S. viewers in the categories “Technology, Science & Education, [and] Business & Careers” on WordPress and Tumblr are NOT interested in learning about a biometric product marketing expert.
I generated this picture in Imagen 4 after reading an AI art prompt suggestion from Danie Wylie. (I have mentioned her before in the Bredemarket blog…twice.)
The AI exercise raises a question.
What if you are in the middle of an identity verification or authentication process, and only THEN discover that a fraudster is impersonating you at that very moment?
And I confess that if I were Joel R. McConvey, I would have unable to resist the overpowering temptation to dip my pen in the inkwell and write the following sentence:
“But as age checks become law in more and more places, the industry will have to weigh how far it can push – or pull out.”
But McConvey’s article does not just cover the Supreme Court’s decision on Texas HB 1181’s age verification requirement for porn websites—and Justice Clarence Thomas’ statement in the majority opinion that the act “triggers, and survives, review under intermediate scrutiny because it only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults.”
What about social media?
The Biometric Update article also notes that a separate case regarding age assurance for social media use is still winding its way through the courts. The article quotes U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg’s ruling on Georgia SB 351:
“[T]he act curbs the speech rights of Georgia’s youth while imposing an immense, potentially intrusive burden on all Georgians who wish to engage in the most central computerized public fora of the twenty-first century. This cannot comport with the free flow of information the First Amendment protects.”
One important distinction: while opposition to pornography is primarily (albeit not exclusively) from the right of the U.S. political spectrum, opposition to social media is more broad-based. So social media restrictions are less of a party issue.
But returning to law rather than politics, one can objectively (or most likely subjectively) debate the Constitutional merits of naked people having sex vs. AI fakes of reunions of the living members of Led Zeppelin, the latter of which seem to be the trend on Facebook these days.
Minority Report
But streaking back to Texas, what of the minority opinion of the three Supreme Court Justices who dissented in the 6-3 opinion? According to The Texas Tribune, Justice Elena Kagan spoke for Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kentanji Brown Jackson:
“But what if Texas could do better — what if Texas could achieve its interest without so interfering with adults’ constitutionally protected rights in viewing the speech HB 1181 covers? The State should be foreclosed from restricting adults’ access to protected speech if that is not in fact necessary.”
If you assume age verification (which uses a government backed ID) rather than age estimation (which does not), the question of whether identity verification (even without document retention) is “restricting” is a muddy one.
Of course all these issues have little to do with the technology itself, reminding us that technology is only a small part of any solution.
Bredemarket 