I’ve discussed identity and privacy regarding people.
I’ve discussed identity and privacy regarding non-person entities.
But I missed something in between.
Earlier this week I was discussing a particular veterinary software use case with an undisclosed person when I found myself asking how the data processing aspects of the use case complied with HIPAA, the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Then I caught myself, realizing that HIPAA (previously discussed here) does not apply to dogs, cats, cows, or other animals. They are considered property, and we all know how U.S. laws have treated property in the past.
So you can violate an animal’s privacy all you want and not run afoul of HIPAA.
But you could run afoul of some other law. As Barb Rand noted back in 2013, 35 states (at the time) had “statutes that address the confidentiality of veterinary patient records.”
And when animal records are commingled with human records—for example, for emotional support animals—protected health information rules do kick in.
Unless the animal is intelligent enough to manage their own prescriptions without human assistance.
Back in July 2023, I wrote a post about financial remote onboarding which included a section entitled “Three changes in banking over the last fifty years.” The first change I addressed was locational change.
The first crack in the whole idea of “going to the bank” was the ability to bank without entering the door of the bank…and being able to bank on Sunday at midnight if you felt like it. Yes, I’m talking about Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), where the “teller,” instead of being a person, was a bunch of metal and a TV screen.
But when I was recently reading a Bluesky post from mclevin that stated (correctly) that the decline in tellers didn’t start with artificial intelligence, but automated teller machines, it occurred to me that even the once-revolutionary ATM is itself outdated in financial terms.
Think about it.
What are the two most important functions of an ATM?
To deposit paper checks.
To obtain physical cash.
I think you see where this is going.
While the ATM still fulfills these functions today, how often do we receive paper checks? And even if we do, why go to a distant ATM to deposit the check when you can often perform the same function using your mobile phone?
And how often do we use cash to pay for things? Often we use a card…or a mobile phone.
Oosto has highlighted two reasons why it’s critical to identify people in healthcare environments.
Healthcare facilities account for 42% of infant abductions…
Think about it. If all you need to identify yourself (or impersonate someone else) is your name and birthdate, a fraudster could easily gain access to a facility and abduct someone else’s child.
(H)ealthcare workers experience violence—both physical and verbal—at a shockingly 5 times higher rate than other industries. This violence accounts for up to 73% of all nonfatal workplace injuries caused by violence.
Again, if you don’t know who you’re dealing with, bad things can happen. I’ll admit that identity verification doesn’t solve this-people can attack healthcare workers even if their identities are known-but the danger of unidentified assaults is great.
“If you’re curious about the status of your account, you can always use the My Spectrum App or sign in to your Spectrum account to check the details. Those are safe and secure ways to connect to your account anytime and from anywhere.”
When you obtain a government ID from one national government, you normally don’t get a second government ID from a different national government, unless you hold dual citizenship.
“President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) has cautioned Taiwanese citizens against China’s reported efforts to lure them into applying for Chinese ID cards and residency permits.”
Because Taiwan is a contested territory, acceptance of People’s Republic of China IDs could resulted in PRC claims to Taiwan…to protect its citizens there. Therefore Taiwan really discourages this.
“According to local regulations, citizens who receive a Chinese ID will have their Taiwanese household registration revoked.”
You could be well on the way to creating your 2025 content already: blog posts, articles, case studies, white papers, proposals, analyses.
It’s not too late to start.
Or you could wait until next week, next month…
But if you want to learn how Bredemarket can work with you to create the identity/biometric content you need now, schedule a free meeting with me to move forward now.
(Ready, fire, aim wildebeest via Imagen 3/Google Gemini)
If I had to choose between acting too quickly and acting too slowly, I would choose the former. You already know I don’t like it when things never get done. But the ready, fire, aim method introduces problems of its own. Let’s look at how ready, fire, aim can adversely affect both external and internal content.
External content
If you haven’t figured it out already, I create a lot of external prospect/customer facing content. Not only for Bredemarket’s clients, but also for Bredemarket itself so I can get more clients. This blog post is an example.
Sometimes I meticulously plan a full campaign via a myriad of Asana tasks covering multiple blog and social media posts. Sometimes the entire project appears in a day or two, sometimes it takes a week, and one recent project took 3 weeks including teaser content, the main content, and follow-up content.
Yes, sometimes I meticulously plan. And other times I just do stuff.
Last Saturday I was struck with an idea for a 2 minute and 20 second landscape video about biometrics and Bredemarket. I knew it was long and many who encountered it wouldn’t watch the whole thing, but I wanted to make my statement and reserve it for bottom of funnel activities.
Only AFTER I posted the video did I realize that this was the logical second part to a 30 second video that I had previously created for biometric clients.
If I had thought this through, I could have started with the 30 second video, THEN introduced the longer video as the logical next step. Like a funnel, if you believe in funnels.
The proper first video
Well, better late than never.
The 30 second edition.
Watch this 30 second video that I made for Bredemarket’s biometric prospects and clients.
For Biometric Clients.
The proper second video
Hey, did you like that video? Would you like to learn more?
The 140 second edition.
Watch this 140 second video that I made for Bredemarket’s extra special biometric prospects and clients.
Well, that’s what I should have done in the first place so I wouldn’t have to make this clumsy fix later.
But there’s still time to fix a future internal campaign before it happens.
Internal content
Because this content is internal I can’t really talk about it, but I anticipate that Bredemarket will be invited to a future event…and I am already planning NOT to attend.
There are a number of stakeholders associated with this event, and in a TLOI kind of way they will have different reactions to my non-attendance. Some of them probably don’t give a you-know-what whether I attend or not. But perhaps there are those who do care, ranging from mild curiosity about why I’m not going, to the other extreme of demanding to know how I could bypass this important event.
So I drafted three messages in case I was asked about my non-attendance: (1) a brief two-paragraph message, (2) a longer message, and (3) a detailed message which delved into my concerns.
But what if I don’t know which message to send? What if I unloaded my deepest darkest fears via the long message, when the stakeholder merely wanted to know if I had other commitments at the time of the event?
So I rewrote the messages so that they build on one another.
Let’s say Bob asks why I’m not attending. I would simply send Bob the first, brief message. If this satisfies Bob’s curiosity, we’re done.
If Bob asks more, then I will send those portions of the second message that weren’t part of the first one—namely, the 3rd and 4th paragraphs of the second message. (The first 2 paragraphs of the second message are identical to the entire first message.
If Bob still questions, I will unload parts of the third message on him—namely the stuff absent from the second (and first) message.
There’s my funnel. And if needed I can skip directly to the third message with certain stakeholders.
And if no one asks why I’m skipping the event, I don’t send ANY communication—and know that my decision to skip the event was the right one.
Future content
So in the future, whether creating external or internal content, I need to pause and think about how it fits into the tons of content I’ve already created.
So that I can tell the best stories.
And so I will achieve ready, aim, fire rather than ready, fire, aim.
Bredemarket 