My current clients realize the importance of a consistent presence, even without my help. They’re always reminding prospects of the benefits of their solutions.
Some of my former clients and non-clients never grasped that importance.
That’s NOT breaking news.
That’s why they are former clients and non-clients; they didn’t need me, or anyone else. One last blogged in February…February 2024. Wonder how many new prospects found THAT company today?
If you don’t want to escape the fate of anonymity, save time and stop reading here. If you want to escape this, read here…and better still, act by booking a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
The reason that I redirected the purpose of my Substack posts is because much of my audience there isn’t familiar with the…um…minutiae of biometrics and identity. (For example, my reference to minutiae would probably go right past all but two of my Substack subscribers.)
My Substack audience is best served with awareness content.
But awareness content is not only informative and educational.
Awareness of you
It also makes prospects aware of your company…which is critically important.
“Technology marketers, do your prospects know who you are?
“If they don’t, then your competitors are taking your rightful revenue.
“Don’t let your competitors steal your money.”
Perhaps steal is a harsh word, but it’s accurate.
Or perhaps a better word is indifference: your actions indicate that you don’t care whether customers buy from you or not. If you cared, you’d actually market your products.
Who needs marketing?
“Nonsense, John! We have a sales staff. Who needs marketers?”
But your sales staff cannot be everywhere. If your prospects don’t know about you and aren’t reaching out to you, then you have to reach out to them.
And the calls? “Hi, I’m Tom with WidgetCorp.” “With who?”
So how is that current quarter looking now?
You need marketing, now
Your current quarter and future quarters would look better if your secret salesperson were working for you. As Rhonda Salvestrini said:
“Content for your business is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic. It’s your secret salesperson because it’s out there working for you 24/7.”
But the secret salesperson won’t engage your prospects until you act to create that content.
I wanted to write a list of the biometric modalities for which I provide experience.
So I started my usual list from memory: fingerprint, face, iris, voice, and DNA.
Then I stopped myself.
My experience with skin goes way beyond fingerprints, since I’ve spent over two decades working with palm prints.
(Can you say “Cambridgeshire method”? I knew you could. It was a 1990s method to use the 10 standard rolled fingerprint boxes to input palm prints into an automated fingerprint identification system. Because Cambridgeshire had a bias to action and didn’t want to wait for the standards folks to figure out how to enter palm prints. But I digress.)
So instead of saying fingerprints, I thought about saying friction ridges.
But there are two problems with this.
First, many people don’t know what “friction ridges” are. They’re the ridges that form on a person’s fingers, palms, toes, and feet, all of which can conceivably identify individuals.
But there’s a second problem. The word “friction” has two meanings: the one mentioned above, and a meaning that describes how biometric data is captured.
No, there is not a friction method to capture faces. Squishing
If you have to do something to provide your biometric data, such as press your fingers against a platen, that’s friction.
If you don’t have to do anything other than wave your fingers, hold your fingers in the air, or show your face as you stand near or walk by a camera, that’s frictionless.
More and more people capture friction ridges with frictionless methods. I did this years ago using MorphoWAVE at MorphoTrak facilities, and I did it today at Whole Foods Market.
So I could list my biometric modalities as friction ridge (fingerprint and palm print via both friction and frictionless capture methods), face, iris, voice, and DNA.
But I won’t.
Anyway, if you need content, proposal, or analysis assistance with any of these modalities, Bredemarket can help you. Book a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
Your cybersecurity firm can provide the most amazing protection software to your clients, and the clients still won’t be safe.
Why not? Because of the human element. All it takes is one half-asleep employee to answer that “We received your $3,495 payment” email. Then all your protections go for naught.
The solution is simple: eliminate the humans.
Eliminating the human element
Companies are replacing humans with bots for other rea$on$. But an added benefit is that when you bring in the non-person entities (NPEs) who are never tired and never emotional, social engineering is no longer effective. Right?
Well, you can social engineer the bot NPEs also.
Birthday MINJA
Last month I wrote a post entitled “An ‘Injection’ Attack That Doesn’t Bypass Standard Channels?” It discussed a technique known as a memory injection attack (MINJA). In the post I was able to sort of (danged quotes!) get an LLM to say that Donald Trump was born on February 22, 1732.
“Visual agents that understand graphical user interfaces and perform actions are becoming frontiers of competition in the AI arms race….
“These agents use vision-language models (VLMs) to interpret graphical user interfaces (GUI) like web pages or screenshots. Given a user request, the agent parses the visual information, locates the relevant elements on the page, and takes actions like clicking buttons or filling forms.”
Clicking buttons seems safe…until you realize that some buttons are so obviously scambait that most humans are smart enough NOT to click on them.
What about the NPE bots?
“They carefully designed and positioned adversarial pop-ups on web pages and tested their effects on several frontier VLMs, including different variants of GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude.
“The results of the experiments show that all tested models were highly susceptible to the adversarial pop-ups, with attack success rates (ASR) exceeding 80% on some tests.”
Educating your users
Your cybersecurity firm needs to educate. You need to warn humans about social engineering. And you need to warn AI masters that bots can also be social engineered.
But what if you can’t? What if your resources are already stretched thin?
If you need help with your cybersecurity product marketing, Bredemarket has an opening for a cybersecurity client. I can offer
Perhaps facial recognition product marketers have heard of stories like this. Or perhaps they haven’t.
Tight budgets. Demands that government agencies save money. Is this the solution?
“Milwaukee police are mulling a trade: 2.5 million mugshots for free use of facial recognition technology.
“Officials from the Milwaukee Police Department say swapping the photos with the software firm Biometrica will lead to quicker arrests and solving of crimes.”
During my three months working with a third-party risk management (TPRM) client, I never heard anyone mention Invela.
Perhaps with reason. Although LinkedIn says the company was founded in 2024, it didn’t post its first blog until April 20, 2025, or its first LinkedIn posts until April 21.
“Invela has officially launched a transformative network to bolster consumer protection and foster innovation within the open banking ecosystem. The Invela Network, developed in collaboration with industry-leading specialist partners, promises to revolutionize how financial institutions manage third-party risk…”
The post goes on to cite the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), but…well…that’s nice.
Invela’s TPRM solution specifically targets the open banking segment of the financial services industry. Open banking, featuring companies such as Plaid, Kong, and Camunda (among others), facilitates the interchange of financial data, rather than keeping it within each bank’s walled garden.
However, the principals at Invela come from companies such as Mastercard (although I could find no information on Invela’s CEO Steve Smith). But the Invela leadership team presumably knows their market. We will see if they know their marketing.
Which reminds me…if you need help with your cybersecurity product marketing, Bredemarket has an opening for a cybersecurity client. I can offer
I just read a story about a young man who went to the Metro, was identified by a facial recognition system, and was snatched up by authorities.
Who wanted him to fight in Ukraine.
Now some of you are puzzled and wondering why Trump wants to send U.S. troops to fight in Ukraine. That…um…doesn’t sound like him.
I forgot to clarify something. This wasn’t the Washington DC Metro. This was the MOSCOW Metro.
“Timofey Vaskin, a lawyer with the nonprofit human rights project Shkola Prizyvnika, told independent Russian TV channel Dozhd that the illegal detention of those potentially liable for conscription had become a massive problem this year, with young males most at risk of being snatched while using the Moscow metro, which has an advanced facial recognition system in place and police officers on duty at every station.”
For the record, use of facial recognition for this purpose is legal in Russia. In the same way that use of facial recognition for national security purposes is legal in the U.S.A. Because when national security is at stake—or when government agencies say national security is at stake—most notions of INFORMED consent go out the window.
Know your use cases…or get someone who does
Facial recognition isn’t only used for national security, or for after-the-fact analysis of a crime such as the Boston Marathon bombings. It’s also used for less lethal purposes, such as familiar face detection on doorbell cameras…except in Illinois.
If you are marketing a facial recognition product, you need to understand all the different use cases for facial recognition, and understand which use cases your product marketing should address, and which it should not.
And if you need help with your facial recognition product marketing, Bredemarket has an opening for a facial recognition client. I can offer
Bredemarket 