Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
Does your identity/biometric firm need written content—blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers?
Why do you need this content, and what is your goal?
How will you create the content? Do you need an extra, experienced hand to help out?
Learn how Bredemarket can create content that drives results for your identity/biometric firm.
Click the image below.
#biometric #contentmarketing #identity
Before I launch into the post…
This is the 500th Bredemarket blog post. Woo hoo! But I’m not going to celebrate now, because we have to get down to business.
Do you want to increase engagement to solidify commitment?
No, not THAT type of engagement, although there are parallels between engagement with a person and engagement with content.
In the same way that content impressions can move a prospect to awareness, content engagement can move a prospect to consideration. And even if you don’t believe in the traditional funnel, it’s obviously a good idea to get prospects to engage with your content.
Jessica Morisette of JM Virtual Solutions recently wrote a blog post entitled “Increase Instagram Engagement With This One-Hour Strategy.” Although I’m sure that she wouldn’t object if you spent 59 or 61 minutes (rather than an exact 60 minutes) on daily engagement, and she DEFINITELY wouldn’t mind if you took some of her techniques and applied them to social media platforms other than Instagram.
Personally, I started trying to put her engagement strategy in practice over the weekend, both on Instagram and (with some adaptation) on LinkedIn. Depending upon time, I may try to apply it on your favorite social platform.
Morisette introduces the post with the following:
Building engagement on Instagram involves creating a genuine connection with your audience. It’s not just about getting likes and comments; it’s about creating meaningful interactions that lead to brand loyalty and growth. To achieve this, you need a strategy that focuses on targeted accounts, not just random.
From https://jmvirtualsolutions.org/blog/f/increase-instagram-engagement-with-this-one-hour-strategy
She then lists six steps to her suggested media engagement strategy. Now I could rip her off and reprint all six here, but then you wouldn’t read her post (which you should do).
So instead I’m going to briefly cover her step 5, engaging with your peers and community.
After devoting time to particular portions of the Instagram platform, Morisette suggests that you start engagement with particular segments. One of those segments is peers and community.
Why?
Supporting others in your niche can encourage them to reciprocate.
From https://jmvirtualsolutions.org/blog/f/increase-instagram-engagement-with-this-one-hour-strategy
I know that content creators are often perceived to be in competition with other content creators, but since each of us is targeting different ideal clients, that competition is less than you think. Since content creators are all in this together, there’s a clear benefit from us supporting each other.
In fact, Morisette believes that this mutual support is so important that she recommends that you engage with your peers and community BEFORE you engage with your ideal client (step 6).
Why does Morisette believe that?
Well…you’ll have to read her post for the answer.
For those who are keeping track, that’s the call to action (CTA) for MY post.
Oh, and also follow @jmsocialsolutions on Instagram. And meaningfully engage!
All of us talk about customer focus. Heck, I just spent the past few days talking about it 31 times, starting here.
But when you are talking about customer focus, make sure that you are talking about the customer’s true focus.
Let me explain.
(See the alternate interpretation at the end of the post.)
Back in 2015, Scott Faucheux wrote a piece on what he called consumer focus. When talking about the voice of the consumer, Faucheux said this:
Many marketers (and most non-marketers), when asked to consider the VOC, will ask themselves, “What would I do if I were in that consumer’s shoes?”
From https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wwcd-what-would-consumer-do-scott-faucheux/
Sounds reasonable, but Faucheux points out an inherent flaw in this approach.
[T]he perspective considered would be based on how I would respond if I were placed in that situation, which is still anchored in my own personal biography and is therefore subject to my own personal biases.
From https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wwcd-what-would-consumer-do-scott-faucheux/
But even if you understand the true voice of the customer, you might go in the wrong direction. Bill McDonald describes what happens when you take VOC as gospel:
The basic concept behind “voice of the customer” calls for you to sell to his or her stated needs. After all, your customers (clients/prospects) know their situation and what they need. Right?
From https://pleinairestrategies.com/2017/07/3-reasons-to-ignore-voice-of-customer/
But this assumes that the customer knows what they need. Often they may not know what they truly need.
To stand out from the crowd, you need a different approach. You need a way to lay the groundwork for change by telling prospects something they don’t already know about their status quo situation.
From https://pleinairestrategies.com/2017/07/3-reasons-to-ignore-voice-of-customer/
I won’t go as far as McDonald and say that VOC should be ignored. Instead, VOC should be augmented by probing questions—and responses—that go beyond “we need a better mousetrap” surface solutions.
Maybe your customer needs a hungry cat.
As for me, when I hear the phrase “walking in my shoes,” I don’t think about shoes. I think about a song.
I just ran across a use of “multimodal” that has nothing to do with fingers, faces, or irises. But it has everything to do with generative AI.
Earlier this week, Chip Huyen published “Multimodality and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)” at his website huyenchip.com. He starts as follows:
For a long time, each ML (machine learning) model operated in one data mode – text (translation, language modeling), image (object detection, image classification), or audio (speech recognition).
However, natural intelligence is not limited to just a single modality. Humans can read and write text. We can see images and watch videos. We listen to music to relax and watch out for strange noises to detect danger. Being able to work with multimodal data is essential for us or any AI to operate in the real world.
From https://huyenchip.com/2023/10/10/multimodal.html?utm_source=tldrai
As you can see from the title, Huyen uses an acronym “LMM” that is very similar to another generative AI acronym, “LLM” (large language model).
So what’s the difference?
Not all multimodal systems are LMMs. For example, text-to-image models like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E are multimodal but don’t have a language model component.
From https://huyenchip.com/2023/10/10/multimodal.html?utm_source=tldrai
If you’re interested in delving into the topic, Huyen’s long three-part post covers the context for multimodality, the fundamentals of a multimodal system, and active research areas.
You can find the post at https://huyenchip.com/2023/10/10/multimodal.html?utm_source=tldrai. And I guess you can figure out how I came across it.
Whenever I see these pieces that proclaim that the author can help you brainstorm x ideas for content, I ignore them. For better or worse, I have no problem coming up with content ideas.
And when I come up with the content ideas, I don’t just use them in one piece of content. I’ll use the idea in several pieces of content. Yes, I love repurposing.
I think I’ve set a new record for myself over the last few days by creating 31 pieces of content from a single idea.
This post talks about:
The post doesn’t aim to tell you how you should create and reshare your content, but perhaps while you’re reading the post you may get some fresh ideas that fit your own working practices.
Before you can share content in numerous places, you need numerous places to share your content. It’s obvious, but it’s true. After all, it would be repetitive to post the exact same content multiple times in the Bredemarket blog.
So since I started Bredemarket in 2020, I not only developed the Bredemarket blog, but I have also developed (or made use of) other social platforms.
But how many social platforms should you use? In July, I noted what the experts advise, and how I responded to that advice.
If you’re starting out in business, you’ve probably heard the advice that as your business branches out into social platforms, you shouldn’t try to do everything at once. Instead you should make sure that your business offering is really solid on one platform before branching out into others.
Yes, I’ve been naughty again and didn’t listen to the expert advice.
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/07/18/is-bredemarket-on-your-favorite-social-platform/
The July post lists all of the social platforms that publish Bredemarket content, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll just note a few of the platforms:
To the content marketing experts that say that I should just concentrate on LinkedIn and ignore everything else, note that I then have a 0% chance of reaching non-LinkedIn users. Who knows? Perhaps that TikTok video may result in a conversion that I couldn’t have made otherwise.
The idea that struck me last weekend was not original to me, and it’s been bouncing around in my head (and on these pages) for some time now. But I thought I’d reword it in a different way. After a few tweaks, I came up with the following statement:
Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product’s Technology
As you will see, I continued to tweak the statement, but that’s the one that I put in my Asana “Content Calendar” project.
As I would subsequently reflect, I thought that companies knew that you need to focus on the customer rather than focusing on yourself, but I see too many companies that are self-focused in their marketing. They emphasize the amazing technology features of their product.
I want to put a stop to that, and if necessary I will help companies create customer-focused marketing materials. For a fee, of course.
But enough about me. Let’s illustrate how that one idea can expand into multiple content pieces.
So now I had to write about how customers don’t care about your product’s technology.
The first step was to work on the content required for a blog post on the topic. By the time I was done, the post (now called “Your Prospects Don’t Care About Your Technology“) included:
Most importantly, the post included all the text that made my original point (“Do you know why your prospects are ignoring you? Because they don’t care about you. It’s all about them.”), along with my argument for customer focus, and my concluding call to action to find out how to “Create Technology Content That Converts.”
And “Create Technology Content That Converts” was the title of my landing page. Often I put the call to action on the same page as the original point, but sometimes (as in this case) I separate the call to action for a more focused presentation. Plus I have the option of having multiple blog posts point to the same landing page. This post points to the landing page, for example (click the GIF above or one of the other links).
The landing page dug more deeply into why and how Bredemarket can help you create a customer-focused message, talking about the questions I ask, the types of content I can create, and the process.
The landing page concluded with the call to action encouraging interested parties to schedule a meeting on my recently-improved Calendly page, email me, or use my contact form. (Or subscribe to my Mailchimp mailing list.)
Once all this was done, everything was set. People who read the blog post could (if so inclined) go to the landing page, and people who read the landing page could (if so inclined) contact me.
But only if they saw the blog post in the first place.
If they don’t find the post on Google or Bing, and if they’re not already subscribing to the blog, then how will they get to the blog post?
There are numerous themes that continuously pop up in the Bredemarket blog, and I have created “information pages” (pillars) that link to all of the content that I have written on these themes.
Now perhaps you won’t do all of this, but if there’s a place on your website where you should mention your new blog post, be sure and do it.
For example, if you wrote a blog post about Topic X in 2021, and you’re readdressing Topic X in a 2023 post, then go back and update the 2021 post to say that you have new thoughts on Topic X. Then the people who find your 2021 post can go to the new post and get the latest information.
My podcast is more accurately described as a mini-podcast, because each episode is usually only 1-2 minutes long. Perhaps someday I’ll create hour-long episodes, but not today.
And on Sunday I created a 2-minute episode with a new take. After noting (as I said above) that sometimes we know things that people don’t know, I declared:
Am I smarter than General Electric? Yes I am.
From https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bredemarket/episodes/Why-Should-I-Care-That-General-Electric-Uses-AI-e2aaenl
I then described a really bad General Electric press release that focused on GE technology and not on customer needs.
Then I plugged the blog post, which was linked in the episode description. And I resued the “technologist doing technology thinks” image from the blog post.
Now I only list this as one piece of content, but really it’s multiple pieces of content. Not only can you access the episode on Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor), but you can also access it on Spotify itself, Apple Podcasts, and numerous other podcast hosting services.
After this, I returned to the blog post itself and looked for other ways to share it.
Because the blog post explicitly mentioned “technology” in the title, the best fit for a reshare of the blog post was on the Bredemarket Technology Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page (reshare here) and Facebook group (reshare here).
Why do I have a myriad of LinkedIn and Facebook outlets?
Because often people who are interested in technology don’t care about identity, and people who are interested in the Inland Empire don’t care about technology, and people who care about Bredemarket in general don’t care about every identity company reshare that I post.
And of course, some people who love LinkedIn hate Facebook, and some people who love Facebook hate LinkedIn.
So I could have just shared this to the technology outlets, but this particular post had a broader application. Inland Empire businesses, identity companies, and general marketers all have the problem of referring to self rather than the customer.
So I reshared the original technology shares to the other relevant groups.
You know how the Instagram experts say that you should post reels? Or you should post carousels? Or whatever?
I say that you should post a healthy balance of all sorts of things.
I wanted to reshare the blog post on Instagram, so I posted an Instagram carousel post using the two images from the blog post and the “money” image from the landing page.
Even though Instagram is a terrible platform to reshare content on other platforms, because the links aren’t clickable.
Unless you reshare the post as a story and use the “link” feature to embed a link.
Oh, and there are two other places where I reshared the link to the blog post:
So that encompassed the first set of content reshares. But before I go on…
All of the stuff listed above was stuff that I meticulously planned by listing subtasks to the original Asana task “Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product’s Technology.”
But I forgot that I deviated from Asana and also shared a link to the podcast in the Bredemarket Technology Firm Services LinkedIn showcase page.
Some people are horrified that I deviated from Asana and didn’t record this important share. (And they’ll really be horrified later in this post when I create another piece of content and don’t log it in Asana.)
Others are horrified that I put all the other stuff in Asana in the first place.
As for me, well, I got the content out. Cool.
But the blog post wasn’t enough. I needed to convey the same message in a different way, for those who think words and stuff aren’t cool.
In the same way that I created an audio podcast that made the same points as the blog post (while linking to the blog post), I wanted to create a video vertical short that did the same thing.
So I headed out to the Southern California Edison Euclid Substation.
I then stood in front of some very technological stuff, and filmed 27 seconds of me talking about the prospect’s problems…and your problem…and how Bredemarket can solve your problem.
By the time I was finished, the video short was available on:
So now both WordPress and Instagram had two pieces of content that kinda sorta said the same thing. But this is good. Maybe some people like the video version, while others like the text version. I’ll catch them one way or ther other.
But before I actually shot the video at the SCE Euclid Substation…
…I was scouting out locations. (If you know the Talking Heads song “Found a Job” you’ll recognize the phrase.)
When I arrived at the SCE Euclid Substation, I walked around the south and west sides of the substation, looking for the best place to shoot my video.
And I was broadcasting on Instagram Live as I was doing this, offering my adoring fans a rare “behind the scenes” look at Bredmarket activities. And, incidentally, proving that Bredemarket behind the scenes is pretty boring.
But the Instagram Live session was recorded, and was posted as a reel a couple of days before my video short was posted.
I don’t know if it made a huge difference in the subsequent reception of the short, but one of my relatives liked the “behind the scenes” look so that’s good.
So those 26 pieces of content addressed Bredemarket’s views on customer focus and benefits.
But my life is not confined to Bredemarket. Time for one huge repurpose.
At the same time that I’m asking Bredemarket prospects to contract with me, I’m asking technology companies (including identity companies) to hire me as a Senior Product Marketing Manager.
And the same message can, with some adaptation, be delivered to hiring companies.
So I wrote a separate blog post on my jebredcal personal blog, “Do Your Prospects Ignore Your Company’s Message?” that addressed the latter target audience.
If you compare the jebredcal blog post with the original Bredemarket blog post, you can see some clear similarities…with some noticeable differences. For example, I don’t ask employers to use Bredemarket’s calendly, email, or web messaging channels. I use my personal email and my LinkedIn profile messaging capability instead.
Now that the blog post was written, I was ready to share it on LinkedIn where the employers are. (No Facebook. No TikTok.)
Correction: I was ALMOST ready to share a link to the post on LinkedIn. I had to complete one thing first.
I decided that on the day before I shared the post on LinkedIn, I’d create a personal video short that introduced the content.
But this one, rather than taking place in front of a cool electrical facility, would be a behind-the-scenes view of Bredemarket’s world headquarters. Since the city of Ontario restricts you from viewing this yourself (restriction 3), this is the only way that you will ever see Bredemarket’s world headquarters.
Exciting?
No, completely boring.
But I did it anyway, and posted the video on LinkedIn yesterday. (And if you look to the left, you can see Bredemarket’s business license as required by restriction 1.)
After a day’s wait, the jebredcal blog post was shared on LinkedIn. I haven’t been swamped with job offers yet, but content marketing doesn’t work like that.
Once I realized that I was going to write one blog post for Bredmarket prospects and one post for potential employers, I decided to write a third post that talked out how you create different content for different target audiences. As I noted above, the two pieces of content have significant similarities, but also significant differences.
But as I thought about it, I thought it would be more important to illustrate how you could take a single idea and repurpose it as 30 different pieces of content.
Well, 30 so far. I still have to figure out how and where to reshare THIS blog post…
Stop the presses!
And here’s another EXCITING behind-the-scenes look at how Bredemarket works!
By Tuesday afternoon (October 10, 2023), I had substantially completed writing this blog post on “How I Expanded 1 Idea Into 30 Pieces of Content.” But since there was no huge rush to publish the post—after all, I had just published 29 other pieces of content over the past few days—I figured I’d take advantage of the opportunity to “sleep on it” and look at the post one more time before publication.
Then something happened early Wednesday morning.
I received a “you have not been selected for this position” email from a potential employer. I had only applied for the position two days earlier, on Monday, right in the midst of all of this content creation.
Proving that I can create content out of ANYTHING, I authored a LinkedIn post that began as follows:
If you are one of the lucky talent acquisition professionals who is still employed, there is ONE CRITICAL THING that you MUST impress upon your employers.
Please tell your employers NOT to list positions as “remote/hybrid.”
That’s kind of like listing a food as “vegan/beef.” Is it vegan, or is it beef? It’s a mystery until you take a bite, and there’s a 50% chance you will be disappointed or horrified with what you find.
From LinkedIn.
You may ask what a LinkedIn post about “remote/hybrid” job listings has to do with incorrectly-focused product marketing messaging.
It’s all in the call to action. Those who read to the end of the post encountered these words.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far and are seeking an experienced identity/biometrics/technology Senior Product Marketing Manager for a #remote position (or a position within 25 miles of Ontario, California), please message me. The linked post below includes my contact information, as well as my philosophy on product marketing messaging.
From LinkedIn.
And then I linked to my personal jobseeking blog post “Do Your Prospects Ignore Your Company’s Message?”
I guess this 31st item is a special treat. Like ice cream.
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
If you listen closely, you can hear about all sorts of wonderful biometric identifiers. They range from the common (such as fingerprint ridges and detail) to the esoteric (my favorite was the 2013 story about Japanese car seats that captured butt prints).
A former coworker who left the biometric world for the world of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) expert consulting brought one of the latter to my attention.
Tongue prints.
This article, shared with me by Krassimir Boyanov of KBWEB Consult, links to this article from Science ABC.
As is usual with such articles, the title is breathless: “How Tongue Prints Are Going To Revolutionize Identification Methods.”
Forget about fingerprints and faces and irises and DNA and gait recognition and butt prints. Tongue prints are the answer!
To its credit, the article does point out two benefits of using tongue prints as a biometric identifier.
But the article also makes these claims.
Two main attributes are measured for a tongue print. First is the tongue shape, as the shape of the tongue is unique to everyone.
From https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-tongue-prints-are-going-to-revolutionize-identification-methods.html
The other notable feature is the texture of the tongue. Tongues consist of a number of ridges, wrinkles, seams and marks that are unique to every individual.
From https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-tongue-prints-are-going-to-revolutionize-identification-methods.html
So tongue shape and tongue texture are unique to every individual?
Prove it.
Even for some of the more common biometric identifiers, we do not have scientific proof that most biometric identifiers are unique to every individual.
But at least these modalities are under study. Has anyone conducted a rigorous study to prove or disprove the uniqueness of tongues? By “rigorous,” I mean a study that has evaluated millions of tongues in the same way that NIST has evaluated millions of fingerprints, faces, and irises?
We know that NIST hasn’t studied tongues.
I did find this 2017 tongue identification pilot study but it only included a whopping 20 participants. And the study authors (who are always seeking funding anyway) admitted that “large-scale studies are required to validate the results.”
So if a police officer tells you to stick out your tongue for identification purposes, think twice.
Your prospects don’t care about your technology!
For more information, see my recent blog post on the topic to find out what your customers DO care about.
Technologists, you know how tough it is to create a technology product.
But when you want to tell the story about your product, and all the effort you put into it, your prospects ignore everything you say. You might as well not be there.
Do you know why your prospects are ignoring you?
Because they don’t care about you. It’s all about them.
But the “it’s all about me” attitude is actually a GOOD thing, if you can harness it in your messaging. Let’s face it; we all have an “it’s all about me” attitude because we want to satisfy our needs.
So when it’s time to tell the story about your product, don’t talk about your technology.
Instead of talking about you, talk about them.
Adopt a customer focus and talk about things that your prospects care about, such as how your product will solve their problems.
In short, your customers need to understand how you can solve their problems.
But how can you make sure that your story resonates with your prospects?
Perhaps you need a guide to work with you to craft your story. Yes, I can serve as a guide to solve YOUR problem.
If you’re interested in how Bredemarket, the technology content marketing expert, can help you create a customer-focused story for your prospects, find out how to create technology content that converts…
If you ask any one of us in the identity verification industry, we’ll tell you how identity verification proves that you know who is accessing your service.
Sound like the perfect solution, especially in industries that rely on age verification to ensure that people are old enough to access the service.
Therefore, if you are employing robust identity verification and authentication that includes age verification, this should never happen.
Eduardo Montanari, who manages delivery logistics at a burger shop north of São Paulo, has noticed a pattern: Every time an order pickup is assigned to a female driver, there’s a good chance the worker is a minor.
From https://restofworld.org/2023/underage-gig-workers-brazil/
An underage delivery person who has been onboarded and authenticated, and whose age has been verified? That’s impossible, you say! Read on.
Rest of World wrote an article (tip of the hat to Bianca Gonzalez of Biometric Update) entitled “Underage gig workers keep outsmarting facial recognition.”
How do the minors do it?
On YouTube, a tutorial — one of many — explains “how to deliver as a minor.” It has over 31,000 views. “You have to create an account in the name of a person who’s the right age. I created mine in my mom’s name,” says a boy, who identifies himself as a minor in the video.
From https://restofworld.org/2023/underage-gig-workers-brazil/
Once a cooperative parent or older sibling agrees to help, the account is created in the older person’s name, the older person’s face and identity document is used to create the account, and everything is valid.
Yes, but what about authentication?
That’s why it’s helpful to use a family member, or someone who lives in the minor’s home.
Let’s say little Maria is at home, during her homework, when her gig economy app rings with a delivery request. Now Maria was smart enough to have her older sister Irene or her mama Cecile perform the onboarding with the delivery app. If she’s at home, she can go to Irene or Cecile, have them perform the authentication, and then she’s off on her bike to make money.
(Alternatively, if the app does not support liveness detection, Maria can just hold a picture of Irene or Cecile up to the camera and authenticate.)
According to Rest of World, one possible solution is to tattle on underage delivery people. If you see something, say something.
But what’s the incentive for a restaurant owner or delivery recipient to report that their deliveries are being performed by a kid?
“The feeling we have is that, at least this poor boy is working. I know this is horrible, but here in Brazil we end up seeing it as an opportunity … It’s ridiculous,” (psychologist Regiane Couto) said.
From https://restofworld.org/2023/underage-gig-workers-brazil/
A much better solution is to replace one-time authetication with continuous authentication, or at least be smarter in authentication. For example, a gig delivery worker could be required to authenticate at multiple points in the process:
It’s too difficult to drag big sister Irene or mama Cecile to ALL of these points.
As an added bonus, these authetications provide timestamps of critical points in the delivery process, which the delivery company and/or restaurant can use for their analytics.
Problem solved.
Except that little Maria doesn’t have any excuse and has to complete her homework.
At the highest level, debates regarding government and enterprise use of biometric technology boil down to a debate about whether to keep people safe, or whether to preserve individual privacy.
In the state of Montana, school safety is winning over school privacy—for now.
Biometric Update links to a Helena Independent Record article on how Montana’s far-reaching biometric ban has one significant exception.
The state Legislature earlier this year passed a law barring state and local governments from continuous use of facial recognition technology, typically in the form of cameras capable of reading and collecting a person’s biometric data, like the identifiable features of their face and body. A bipartisan group of legislators went toe-to-toe with software companies and law enforcement in getting Senate Bill 397 over the finish line, contending public safety concerns raised by the technology’s supporters don’t overcome individual privacy rights.
School districts, however, were specifically carved out of the definition of state and local governments to which the facial recognition technology law applies.
From the Helena Independent Record.
At a minimum Montana school districts seek to abide by two existing Federal laws when installating facial recognition and video surveillance systems.
Without many state-level privacy protection laws in place, school policies typically lean on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law requiring parental consent in order for websites to collect data on their children, or the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which protects the privacy of student education records.
From the Helena Independent Record.
If a vendor doesn’t agree to abide by these laws, then the Montana School Board Association recommends that the school district not do business with the vendor.
Other vendors agree. Here is the statement of one vendor, Verkada (you’ll see them again later) on FERPA:
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act was passed by the US federal government to protect the privacy of students’ educational records. This law requires public schools and school districts to give families control over any personally identifiable information about the student.
Verkada provides educational organizations the tools they need to maintain FERPA compliance, such as face blurring for archived footage.
From https://www.verkada.com/security/#compliance
How are the schools using these systems? In ways you may expect.
(The Sun River Valley School District’s) use of the technology is more focused on keeping people who shouldn’t be on school property away, he said, such as a parent who lost custody of their child.
(Simms) High School Principal Luke McKinley said it’s been more frequent to use the facial recognition technology during extra-curricular activities, when football fans get too rowdy for a high school sports event.
From the Helena Independent Record.
Technology (in this case from Verkada) helps the Sun River School District, especially in its rural setting. Back in 2022, it took law enforcement an estimated 45 minutes to respond to school incidents. The hope is that the technology could identify those who engaged in illegal activity, or at least deter it.
When I created my educational identity page, I included the four key words “When permitted by law.” While Montana school districts are currently permitted to use facial recognition and video surveillance, other school districts need to check their local laws before implementing such a system, and also need to ensure that they comply with federal laws such as COPPA and FERPA.
I may be, um, biased in my view, but as long as the school district (or law enforcement agency, or apartment building owner, or whoever) complies with all applicable laws, and implements the technology with a primary purpose of protecting people rather than spying on them, facial recognition is a far superior tool to protect people than manual recognition methods that rely on all-too-fallible human beings.
Bredemarket