Category Archives: Uncategorized

Veriff on Age Verification With Birth Certificates

In the past, if you needed to check the age of a younger teenager or a child who didn’t have a driver’s license, you had two options:

  • Estimate their age.
  • Hope they had a passport.

While many (not all) people have a birth certificate, Veriff reminds us that digital age verification with a birth certificate is difficult.

“Processing civil documents at scale was once a legitimate operational nightmare. Birth certificates vary dramatically in format across states and countries, making manual extraction slow, inconsistent, and error-prone.”

Why the nightmare?

To examine the reasons for the birth certificate operational nightmare, let’s limit ourselves to the United States for the moment.

Driver’s licenses and similar IDs are challenging enough because they are issued by over 50 separate states and territories, and in several different formats (different driver license categories, non driver license IDs, plus special formats for minors and people below legal drinking age). So you’re talking about potentially thousands of formats.

But at least those are renewed every few years.


Birth certificate of a B.H. Obama II. From https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

Birth certificates are often NOT renewed (although you could conceivably request a new copy). So as a state changes its birth certificate formats over the decades, it could go through multiple different formats. And in a few cities such as New York City, they issued their own birth certificates independently of the state.

To complicate things further, the security on birth certificates is rudimentary, or perhaps non-existent for older birth certificates. Compare to driver’s licenses which are always incorporating new security features. (And older driver’s licenses without those security features are no longer valid or accepted.)

In short, validating birth certificates is significantly harder than validating driver’s licenses, which is hard enough.

Can we verify birth certificates today?

Veriff says it’s becoming possible.

“Modern automated extraction technology changes that reality. What was once a processing bottleneck is now a scalable, deployable component of a serious compliance strategy.”

How?

“Unlike a standardized driver’s license with a predictable layout and a scannable barcode, birth certificates are heavily unstructured….Modern unstructured document technology eliminates this bottleneck. Advanced extraction tools use intelligent models to read and pull key details from complex civil documents, regardless of the layout. By accurately capturing the date of birth, parent or guardian information, and place of birth, these tools turn a clunky manual review process into a fast, scalable verification workflow.”

Apply enough processing power and enough smarts and you can solve anything.

For Those Who Still Write User Manuals, They’re Better Now

1984 John would have been so jealous of me on Tuesday.

On Tuesday I was writing an installation guide for a Bredemarket client. Even though it was a simply formatted guide, its formatting was light years ahead the software user manuals I wrote around 1984 (no significance, just coincidence).

As I previously mentioned, 1984 John wrote user manuals using a software package called multiWRITE. You’ve probably never heard of it. multiWRITE was a word processor for the THEOS operating system that was developed by my employer, Logic eXtension Resources. So when I wrote the user manual for multiWRITE, I used…multiWRITE. Yeah, I ate my own wildebeest food even in the 1980s.

Google Gemini.

Now multiWRITE was a pretty good software package for the time, and THEOS was a pretty good operating system for the time. But by 2026 standards it was atrocious.

  • The output was bi-tonal, just black and white with no colors or even grayscale output.
  • The output was monospaced, just like a typewriter. Typewriters were still very common in 1984.

Things started to change as Logic eXtension Resources started to offer Macintosh software and started using Macs for internal document creation. But for my first years at Logic eXtension Resources it was basically typewriter-looking text saved to disk.

Fast forward to 2026, and I had to create a simple installation guide using today’s tools. The manual wasn’t fancy by any stretch of the imagination: even my ebook on the six factors of identity verification is fancier.

Oh, have I mentioned my ebook recently? Now I have. Click the image to buy.

Four pages from "Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication" by John E. Bredehoft, Bredemarket. Click on the image to purchase.
Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication.

But the client’s installation guide had several features that left multiWRITE in the dust.

One example: back in 1984 my text highlighting options were limited.

Re-creation of multiWRITE 1984 text.

On Tuesday I wrote a sentence that looked like this.

Actual Microsoft Word 2026 text.

Yeah, blue text. 1984 me would have been shocked.

Google Gemini.

But then again, other than me, who writes user manuals any more?

Who In Your Company Knows What Due Dates Are?

Proactive project management is possible, as the (anonymized) Bredemarket example later in this post illustrates. But first I am compelled to talk about an uncomfortable topic, due dates.

What is a due date?

Some people in a company don’t know what a “due date” is. If the work isn’t done by this Friday, it will get done by next Friday. Or whenever.

But there’s one part of your company that lives and breathes due dates. I talked about this in March 2025 as it relates to Bredemarket’s clients.

“I still enjoy the satisfaction when my client submits a persuasive, compliant proposal. A day before the due date, even.”

Which is better than submitting a proposal AFTER the due date.

Google Gemini.

Why does Proposals care about due dates?

Why does Proposals tend to care more about due dates than, say, Product Marketing?

Because the latter due dates are set internally. And the “agile curse” is that you can, and often do, change anything on a whim.

“The Perpetual Roadmap.” Google Gemini/Lyria. Public Domain.

Contrast with proposal due dates that are set externally by an outside entity such as a government agency that receives funding for a particular fiscal year. Funds that you use or lose.

How can others implement due dates?

For your organization’s product marketing initiatives, do you adopt a “we’ll do it when we get to it” approach?

You don’t have to.

Last week my client and I were getting proactive about an end customer’s anticipated requests. I was recording these in Excel.

Then I added an “anticipated due date” column.

Which allowed me to ask a question.

To preserve client and end customer confidentiality, I have obfuscated and fictionalized the question that I asked.

“Hey, Fernando, the widget manufacturer says that they will want a user guide, whatever that is.

Google Gemini.

“I doubt they’ll want it when they deliver their green widget pitch in Brooklyn next Tuesday, but is there a chance they’ll need it when they meet with Jay Leno’s folks the following week?”

Proactive project management involves transparency between the outside project manager (me), the client, and the end customer. Since we knew that the end customer was meeting with the organization of Jay Leno, we could ask the right questions and schedule a deliverable before the end customer even asked.

Google Gemini.

And we had a due date.

So what?

But what does this mean for you?

It means that Bredemarket can proactively manage your projects, whether they involve content, proposals, or analysis.

I provide product management consulting for identity, biometric, and technology products. In fact, I am a leading biometric product marketing consultant. (Among others.)

Google Gemini.

If you need an outside consultant to manage your product marketing projects, let’s talk.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers
Content, proposals, and analysis for tech marketers.

Let me help you…forge your future

.

Forge Your Future.

Some Hallucinations Are GOOD Hallucinations

Most of us treat hallucinations as an evil, scary thing. With some exceptions.

Moody Blues, “Legend Of A Mind.”

This negative perception of hallucinations extends to our views of generative artificial intelligence. Although perhaps what generative AI does is more accurately called “confabulations.”

““A hallucination is a conscious sensory perception that is at variance with the stimuli in the environment. A confabulation, on the other hand, is the making of assertions that are at variance with the facts, such as “the president of France is Francois Mitterrand,” which is currently not the case.”

Whatever you call it, the result is not consciously intended. And it can sometimes be bad.

Lying on a job application

Take those AI tools that jobseekers can use to not only apply for a job, but automatically customize their resume for that particular job.

When automatic resume rewrites are not reviewed, the new resume may end up with confabulations, hallucinations, or outright falsehoods.

If my rewritten resume claims two years’ Python experience, that just ain’t true.

And I could lose a job opportunity if I lie on my resume.

Fly (on) an eagle

But those who praise hallucinations as good are not limited to Timothy Leary.

Take the time I intentionally asked Google Gemini’s image creation engine (Imagen 4 at the time) to make something up.

Google Gemini (Imagen 4).

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t see any harm in creating a Tolkienesque illustration of Theodore Roosevelt riding a flying bald eagle. Actually, TR fans may think it’s pretty cool.

By definition, ANY generative AI engine HAS to invent stuff. A prompt can’t specify everything.

Audio inventiveness

Let’s look at another example, the two-plus minute song that formed the audio for my recent reel “The Cooling Blue.”

“The Cooling Blue.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.

Now here is the prompt that I used to create that audio track.

“Create a moving song with violin, harp, and guitar about overly long meetings. The opening male spoken words are “meeting hour 1, meeting hour 2, meeting hour 3, meeting hour 4.” The female singer, accompanied by a female choir, sings of her despair in pointless meetings with no purpose. The chorus consists of the choir singing “When will this madness end?””

When you review the prompt you can see many of the elements of the final song.

But I never told Lyria to sing “the coffee turned to ink.” Lyria made that up.

But I like that addition.

And I have another example.

Image inventiveness

This example is from the images that appeared throughout the video. These were also created by Google; is the image generation capability still called Nano Banana this month?

Anyway, here is the prompt for the noon scene.

“Edit the picture so the time is noon and the lead wombat is still droning on and on. The attendees are restless.”

Google Gemini.

Google executed my image request.

But look more closely.

Google Gemini.

I did NOT specify that the koala write the note “Make it end…so sleepy.” Or any of the other notes that this particular koala wrote throughout the day.

Nor did I specify the “out of order” note that appeared on the coffee urn at 10:10 am.

(My little secret: that time was NOT supposed to be 10:10. I asked Google to display a time of 10:45. But since so much of the clock training data uses at 10:10 time, Google got confused.)

Prompt and response from Google Gemini.

But I like those additions.

Take two minutes and twenty-four seconds and watch the reel again, taking note of the few elements specified by me, and the many elements that were “made up” by Google.

“The Cooling Blue.” Google Gemini/Lyria. Public Domain.

Hallucinations can be good, evil, or indifferent

Adding a koala note of frustration is a good thing.

Lying on a job application is a bad thing.

And showing a time of 10:10 instead of the requested time of 10:45? It didn’t materially affect my story, so I was indifferent to it.

Underwriting the Ghost: Synthetic Borrowers Disappear Without Paying

When a lender receives a loan application, it endeavors to ensure that the applicant will pay the lender back.

But even with the proper controls, a certain percentage of loans go unpaid.

Especially if the applicant looks really good on paper, but isn’t…and doesn’t even exist because it’s a synthetic identity.

PYMNTS describes the threat from deepfake borrowers:

“Across the lending industry, a new category of fraud is emerging that combines deepfake video, cloned voices, synthetic identity creation, fabricated employment histories and AI-generated financial behavior into a single engineered persona. These synthetic borrowers are not merely fake identities in the traditional sense. They are algorithmically optimized consumers designed to survive onboarding checks, satisfy underwriting models and disappear once loans are funded.”

Disappearing borrowers is not a good thing.

Know your customer.

“Underwriting the Ghost.” Synthetic man gets the loan, then he disappears. Google Gemini/Lyria. Public Domain.