Tag Archives: identity

Are You ConTENT? Balance Your Critical List With Your Prospects’ Critical Lists

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Normally I talk about CONtent, but today I’m talking about conTENT. (OK, a little bit about CONtent also.)

There are many prospects that may be CRITICALLY IMPORTANT (the highest of my three levels of importance) to your firm—perhaps too many. You can reduce your firm’s list of critically important prospects without losing them altogether. The extra time you receive benefits your firm and your TRUE critically important prospects. And eventually the other prospects may come around anyway.

Let them

You may pursue a prospect because you perceive they have a need. For example, there are identity/biometric companies that have not blogged in over a year, and these companies obviously have a need to increase their visibility with their own prospects by blogging.

But what if the identity/biometric prospects are not HUNGRY to satisfy that need? (Hungry people = true target audience.) Addressing the need may even be “important” to the prospects—but not CRITICALLY important.

  • Now I can create (and have created) content addressing this need and how to fill it. If a prospect searches for this content, they will find it.
  • I can even proactively initiate direct contact with these prospects, and maybe even contact them a second time.

But in most cases a prospect may respond with a “not interested” message—if the prospect even responds at all.

From https://www.melrobbins.com/.

Mel Robbins has a response to this.

“Let them.”

When you “Let Them” do whatever it is that they want to do, it creates more control and emotional peace for you and a better relationship with the people in your life.

From https://www.melrobbins.com/podcasts/episode-70.

If the prospect is not hungry for your services at this time, let them.

Trying to feed a non-hungry person can have catastrophic consequences. From https://flish.uk/blog/external/2019/09/have-you-seen-the-entire-mr-creosote-sketch-from-monty-pythons-the-meaning-of-life.

And at the same time move the prospect from your “critically important” category down to your “important” category. Focus on the critically important prospects, and be content (conTENT) with them rather than stressing out over the uncontrollable prospects.

But don’t eliminate the merely important prospects entirely, because some day they may become hungry for your services. Continue creating content (CONtent) such as your own blogs, plus social media without messaging the merely important people directly. When they DO get hungry, they will emerge from your trust funnel and contact YOU, asking for your services.

Becoming conTENT

What happens when you, in the words of Mel Robbins, “let them”?

You’re focused, your true critically important prospects are happy that you’re paying attention to them, your merely important prospects are happy that you’re no longer pestering them…

…and everyone is conTENT.

When Educational Identity Practices Don’t Meet the Future of Privacy Forum Pledge

Designed by Freepik.

When education vendors say that they protect the identities of their customers, but they don’t, bad things can happen. Illuminate Education discovered this the hard way.

On Monday, Thomas O’Malley shared the 2023 Comparitech article “US schools leaked 32 million records in 2,691 data breaches since 2005.” These leaks were due to large-scale breaches such as Illuminate Education and Blackbaud, as well as many other breaches, and affected institutions at all educational levels.

The December 2021 Illuminate Education data breach was first reported in January 2022, and by September was revealed to have affected schools across the country, exposing students’ names, birthdates, and other personal identifiable information (PII).

Two attempted class action lawsuits against Illuminate Education have been defeated. But there has still been fallout:

(The Future of Privacy Forum) initiated a review, seeking to determine whether (Illuminate Education’s) practices were and are consistent with its Pledge commitments, specifically with respect to technological safeguards in place to protect the security of data. Publicly available information appears to confirm that Illuminate Education did not encrypt all student information while at rest and in transit. Such a failure to encrypt would violate several Pledge provisions…

From https://studentprivacypledge.org/news/fpf-drops-illuminate-education-from-student-privacy-pledge/.

As a result of its inability to confirm that Illuminate Education practiced recommended data encryption practices, the Future of Privacy Forum “removed Illuminate Education from the list of Student Privacy Pledge signatories.” As of January 23, 2024, Illuminate Education’s status as a signatory has not been restored.

Can a company’s status as a Future of Privacy Forum signatory guarantee that they take all necessary steps to protect educational identity data? Of course not; perhaps there are unknown data protection failures by a signatory, and conversely a company may implement stellar policies but just never bothered to sign on the dotted line.

But presence or absence on the FPF signatories list can serve as a positive or negative risk indicator.

The Double Loop Podcast Discusses Research From the Self-Styled “Inventor of Cross-Fingerprint Recognition”

(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)

Apologies in advance, but if you’re NOT interested in fingerprints, you’ll want to skip over this Bredemarket identity/biometrics post, my THIRD one about fingerprint uniqueness and/or similarity or whatever because the difference between uniqueness and similarity really isn’t important, is it?

Yes, one more post about the study whose principal author was Gabe Guo, the self-styled “inventor of cross-fingerprint recognition.”

From https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabeguo/.

In case you missed it

In case you missed my previous writings on this topic:

But don’t miss this

Well, two other people have weighed in on the paper: Glenn Langenburg and Eric Ray, co-presenters on the Double Loop Podcast. (“Double loop” is a fingerprint thing.)

From https://doublelooppodcast.com/about-us/.

So who are Langenburg and Ray? You can read their full biographies here, but both of them are certified latent print examiners. This certification, administered by the International Association for Identification, is designed to ensure that the certified person is knowledgeable about both latent (crime scene) fingerprints and known fingerprints, and how to determine whether or not two prints come from the same person. If someone is going to testify in court about fingerprint comparison, this certification is recognized as a way to designate someone as an expert on the subject, as opposed to a college undergraduate. (As of today, the list of IAI certified latent print examiners as of December 2023 can be found here in PDF form.)

Podcast episode 264 dives into the Columbia study in detail, including what the study said, what it didn’t say, and what the publicity for the study said that doesn’t match the study.

Eric and Glenn respond to the recent allegations that a computer science undergraduate at Columbia University, using Artificial Intelligence, has “proven that fingerprints aren’t unique” or at least…that’s how the media is mischaracterizing a new published paper by Guo, et al. The guys dissect the actual publication (“Unveiling intra-person fingerprint similarity via deep contrastive learning” in Science Advances, 2024 by Gabe Guo, et al.). They state very clearly what the paper actually does show, which is a far cry from the headlines and even public dissemination originating from Columbia University and the author. The guys talk about some of the important limitations of the study and how limited the application is to real forensic investigations. They then explore some of the media and social media outlets that have clearly misunderstood this paper and seem to have little understanding of forensic science. Finally, Eric and Glenn look at some quotes and comments from knowledgeable sources who also have recognized the flaws in the paper, the authors’ exaggerations, and lack of understanding of the value of their findings.

From https://doublelooppodcast.com/2024/01/fingerprints-proven-by-ai-to-not-be-unique-episode-264/.

Yes, the episode is over an hour long, but if you want to hear a good discussion of the paper that goes beyond the headlines, I strongly recommend that you listen to it.

TL;DR

If you’re in a TL;DR frame of mind, I’ll just offer one tidbit: “uniqueness” and “similarity” are not identical. Frankly, they’re not even similar.

Will Ferrell and Chad Smith, or maybe vice versa. Fair use. From https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/will-ferrell-chad-smith-red-hot-benefit-chili-peppers-6898348/, originally from NBC.

Intelligently Writing About Biometrics

Let’s say that your identity/biometric firm has decided that silence ISN’T golden, and that perhaps your firm needs to talk about its products and services.

Silence is not an optimal communication strategy. By Lorelei7, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3164780

For example, let’s say that your firm fights crooks who try to fraudulently use synthetic identities, and you want to talk about your solution.

So you turn to your favorite generative AI tool to write something that will represent your company in front of everyone. What could go wrong?

Battling synthetic identities requires a multi-pronged approach. Layering advanced technology is key: robust identity verification using government-issued IDs and biometrics to confirm a person’s existence, data enrichment and validation from diverse sources to check for inconsistencies, and machine learning algorithms to identify suspicious patterns and red flags. Collaboration is crucial too, from financial institutions sharing watchlists to governments strengthening regulations and consumers practicing good cyber hygiene. Ultimately, vigilance and a layered defense are the best weapons against these ever-evolving digital phantoms.

From Google Bard.

Great. You’re done, and you saved a lot of money by NOT hiring an identity blog writing expert. The text makes a lot of important points, so I’m sure that your prospects will be inspired by it.

Bot-speak is not an optimal communication strategy either. Generated at craiyon.com.

Well…

…until your prospects ask what YOU do and how you are better than every other identity firm out there. If you’re the same as all the other “me too” solutions, then your prospects will just go with the lowest price provider.

So how do you go about intelligently writing about biometrics?

No-siree.

Intelligently writing about biometrics requires that you put all of this information together AND effectively communicate your message…

…including why your identity/biometrics firm is great and why all the other identity/biometric firms are NOT great.

If you’re doing this on your own, be sure to ask yourself a lot of questions so that you get started on the right track.

If you’re asking Bredemarket to help you create your identity/biometric content by intelligently writing about biometrics, I’ll take care of the questions.

Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

Oh, and one more thing: if you noted my use of the word “no siree” earlier in this post, it was taken from the Talking Heads song “The Big Country.” Here’s an independent video of that song, especially recommended for people outside of North America who may not realize that the United States and Canada are…well, big countries.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvua6zPIi7c.

I’m tired of looking out the window of the airplane
I’m tired of traveling, I want to be somewhere

From https://genius.com/Talking-heads-the-big-country-lyrics.

Get the Balance Right

Have you ever created content that contradicts itself?

Let me take you back to 1978, when the Who released an album entitled “Who Are You”—whose title song is beloved by identity/biometrics professionals over 45 years later.

Fair use. From the album “Who Are You.”

But there’s another song on the album that seems at first glance to speak to the times of 1978.

Bands of the last decade like the Who had apparently been eclipsed by bands like the Sex Pistols, a band that had already imploded.

In this environment, the Who recorded a song called “Music Must Change,” a song that seemed to speak to the changing of the guard.

Until you listened to the song’s obscure lyrics and orchestral backing, which makes as much sense as an entire double album about a musician spitting at his audience. (That album would come in 1979.)

Meet the new song…same as the old song.

From https://youtu.be/ROG9llPP9qE?si=nyeRi2bXIiOCjNUh.

SOMEONE is Using my 29 Years of Identity/Biometrics Experience

On behalf of a recruiter I am re-examining my consulting experience in the identity/biometric industry, and came to this realization:

If Bredemarket hasn’t consulted for you, it’s a guarantee that Bredemarket has applied its 29 years of identity/biometric experience consulting for your competitors.

Do you want your competitors to realize all the benefits?

I didn’t think so.

Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

Why Your Identity Company Isn’t Saying Anything

Bredemarket spends a lot of its time on competitive analysis, either as part of client projects, or for my own personal edification. For example, right now I’m working on a client project and analyzing 20 of the client’s competitors in over 20 markets serving hundreds of customers.

But when I perform competitive analysis, I use entirely ethical and legal methods to obtain my competitive information. Nothing clandestine that will get me in trouble.

Painting of French spy captured during the Franco-Prussian War. By Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville – [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38398454

But sometimes the well of competitive information goes dry. Companies go silent and then come back, with no explanation of why its former communications were…um…incomplete.

    From Jive Records. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1956883

    Of course, I don’t know why a particular company suddenly decides that prospect/customer communication isn’t critically important.

    But this got me thinking. How often DO companies go silent?

    And I had an excellent way to conduct a mini-survey and find out.

    Are the 40+ blogging identity firms still blogging?

    Back in September, I identified over 40 identity firms that were blogging, some more frequently than others. Blogging provides quantifiable benefits, and these companies were obviously taking advantage of those benefits.

    Data source: Daily Infographic, https://www.dailyinfographic.com/state-of-blogging-industry

    But that was back in September. How many of those companies were still actively blogging in mid-December? I wanted to find out, so I conducted a mini-survey of those identity blogs. Of the 40+ companies whose blogs and articles had identifiable posting dates:

    • 21 had blogged at least once this month (December).
    • 11 had last blogged in November.
    • 3 had last blogged in October.
    • 7 hadn’t blogged since the 3rd calendar quarter of 2023 (July – September).
    • 4 hadn’t blogged since the 2nd calendar quarter (April – June).
    • 1 hadn’t blogged since the 1st calendar quarter (January – March).
    • 1 hadn’t blogged at all in 2023. Perhaps it forgot it had a blog, or a former employee never surrendered the password.
    A little quiet, aren’t you? By Lorelei7, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3164780

    My mini-survey shows that of the 40+ identity firms with blogs, about one-third of them HAVEN’T SAID A SINGLE THING to their prospects and customers in the last two months.

    Is your firm failing to engage in identity blog post writing, even though you have a blog?

    But what about other communications?

    To be fair, this is not a complete measure of corporate content marketing. While some of these companies hadn’t blogged on their own websites, they HAD communicated on Instagram (Mark Zuckerberg’s website), LinkedIn (Satya Nadella’s website), X (Elon Musk’s website), YouTube (Sundar Pichai’s website), and other websites controlled by other people. Great traffic for Zuck et al…not so great traffic for the companies.

    More importantly, some of these companies communicate via email, which is a great way to find out what the company is doing…if the company has your email address.

    If the company doesn’t have your email address, and if it isn’t blogging, then it’s going to be hard for prospects to find company information.

    So why is your identity firm ignoring your customers?

    Some identity companies with blogs and similar mechanisms are consciously making the choice to NOT communicate with their prospects and customers.

    Why not?

    There are many reasons. Here are five reasons that Full Funnel identified.

    • A couple of them have already been addressed by Bredemarket, such as “we don’t have the time.” (Bredemarket has the time.)
    • But I would like to dive into Full Funnel’s fourth reason: “we don’t have anything to say.” I encourage you to read Full Funnel’s response to that objection, because I agree with it. Your firm MUST have something to say if it wants to differentiate itself and remain viable. If you don’t have anything to say, prospects will go to your more talkative competitors.

    When is your identity company going to start communicating with your prospects and customers?

    If your identity company has fallen down on the blogging front, it’s best to restart the process as soon as possible. As I’ve said before, content marketing doesn’t yield immediate results. A particular piece of content may not result in a sale until six or twelve months later, or longer. Delaying the implementation simply delays the benefits I mentioned above.

    So if your identity company is failing to reach your prospects and customers with content, why don’t you talk with Bredemarket now and develop a plan to reach them?

    Yes, I know we’re right in the middle of the holidays, and some of you will put this off until next week, or probably the week after next.

    For me, that’s just as well. That gives me more time to talk to your competitors and get their content process moving.

    If you DON’T want your competitors to get in line ahead of you, click the image below and schedule a meeting. I’m available this week and most of next week.

    Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

    Stand Out From the Identity Crowd

    Dionne Quintuplets – School Days, painting by Andrew Loomis, 1938. By Andrew Loomis – https://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/7797309642/in/album-72157631099965608/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56000992

    A note to those of you in the identity/biometrics industry.

    From Sandeep Kumar, A. Sony, Rahul Hooda, Yashpal Singh, in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research, “Multimodal Biometric Authentication System for Automatic Certificate Generation.”

    Gartner has released a new report, “Emerging Tech: Security — How to Stay Relevant as an Identity Verification Vendor.” Because it’s better to be relevant than to be irrelevant.

    Anthropological Alphonse Bertillon. By Jebulon – Own work, stitching of archives of Service Regional d’Identité Judiciaire, Préfecture de Police, Paris., CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37546591

    When co-author Akif Khan promoted the report on LinkedIn, he made the following comment:

    Identity verification (which Gartner defines as the ID-plus-selfie process) is arguably the topic that I get the most inquiry calls about, but I also cover >70 vendors in this space. My end-user clients struggle to differentiate between them, and as the market evolves, it will become tougher to stand out in the crowd.

    From LinkedIn.

    C. Maxine Most of Acuity Market Intelligence advocates a similar message about the need to stand out. She provides the following to her clients:

    Innovate, differentiate, and outmaneuver the competition

    From https://www.acuitymi.com/.

    It is in the vendors’ interest to keep the identity market from becoming a commodity market. But how can vendors keep the market from becoming commoditized when (almost) everyone is sharing the exact same message?

    • Why are you in business? To provide trust.
    • What do you do? Trust stuff.
    • How do you do this? Trust us.

    If all the identity companies are peddling the exact same thing, the cheapest vendor wins.

    Which is why certain vendors strive to do things differently.

    And I’m here to help.

    I ask my clients questions before I start work so that we can craft the client’s unique message. Read Bredemarket’s e-book “Seven Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You” for more details.

    Are you ready to craft a message that looks just like everybody else? Well, I CAN’T help you with that.

    Are you ready to craft your own message? Then let me tell you how Bredemarket CAN help you do this.

    Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

    Identification Perfection is Impossible

    (Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)

    There are many different types of perfection.

    Jehan Cauvin (we don’t spell his name like he spelled it). By Titian – Bridgeman Art Library: Object 80411, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6016067

    This post concentrates on IDENTIFICATION perfection, or the ability to enjoy zero errors when identifying individuals.

    The risk of claiming identification perfection (or any perfection) is that a SINGLE counter-example disproves the claim.

    • If you assert that your biometric solution offers 100% accuracy, a SINGLE false positive or false negative shatters the assertion.
    • If you claim that your presentation attack detection solution exposes deepfakes (face, voice, or other), then a SINGLE deepfake that gets past your solution disproves your claim.
    • And as for the pre-2009 claim that latent fingerprint examiners never make a mistake in an identification…well, ask Brandon Mayfield about that one.

    In fact, I go so far as to avoid using the phrase “no two fingerprints are alike.” Many years ago (before 2009) in an International Association for Identification meeting, I heard someone justify the claim by saying, “We haven’t found a counter-example yet.” That doesn’t mean that we’ll NEVER find one.

    You’ve probably heard me tell the story before about how I misspelled the word “quality.”

    In a process improvement document.

    While employed by Motorola (pre-split).

    At first glance, it appears that Motorola would be the last place to make a boneheaded mistake like that. After all, Motorola is known for its focus on quality.

    But in actuality, Motorola was the perfect place to make such a mistake, since it was one of the champions of the “Six Sigma” philosophy (which targets a maximum of 3.4 defects per million opportunities). Motorola realized that manufacturing perfection is impossible, so manufacturers (and the people in Motorola’s weird Biometric Business Unit) should instead concentrate on reducing the error rate as much as possible.

    So one misspelling could be tolerated, but I shudder to think what would have happened if I had misspelled “quality” a second time.

    Announcing a WhatsApp Channel for Identity, Biometrics, ID Documents, and Geolocation

    From NIST.

    I’ve previously stated that Bredemarket is present on a bunch of social platforms.

    Well, if you’re a subscriber to the Bredemarket mailing list, or to the Bredemarket Threads account, then you already know what I’m about to say. Bredemarket is now on one additional social platform…kinda sorta.

    I’ll explain:

    • What WhatsApp channels are.
    • How this impacted me.
    • Most importantly, why this may, or may not, impact you.

    (Long-time readers of the Bredemarket blog see what I did there. In reverse.)

    What are WhatsApp channels?

    Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and half the known universe, wants to keep people on those social platforms. They can check out any time they like, but they can never leave.

    Scanned by Wikipedia user David Fell from the CD cover, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14790284

    So now WhatsApp, the service that was originally intended for PRIVATE communications between people that knew each other’s phone numbers, is now your latest source for Kardashians news. Seriously; there are millions of people who follow the Daily Mail’s “Kardashians News” channel.

    No, this is NOT a Kardashian (yet), but this is something that @cultpopcult would post (with a misattribution) so I’m doing it myself. By Office of Congressman Greg Steube – https://twitter.com/RepGregSteube/status/1451579098606620673, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112088903

    Some people are kinda sorta breathless about this, if you take the IMM Institute’s LinkedIn article “WhatsApp Channels: Revolutionising Business Communication” as evidence.

    WhatsApp, a widely used messaging platform, has recently introduced a revolutionary feature known as WhatsApp Channels. This innovation empowers businesses to thrive by effectively communicating with a broader audience, sharing vital information, and engaging with customers in a more personalised and efficient manner.

    From LinkedIn.

    Revolutionary? Frankly, this isn’t any more revolutionary than the similar broadcasting feature in Instagram, with one important difference: not everyone can create an Instagram channel, but anyone with WhatsApp channel access can set up their own channel.

      Which got me thinking.

      How I was impacted by WhatsApp Channels

      I began mulling over whether I should create my own WhatsApp channel, but initially decided against it. Bredemarket has enough social media properties already, and the need to put Bredemarket stuff on WhatsApp is not pressing (the “100” WhatsApp group members get enough Bredemarket stuff already). The chances of someone ONLY being on WhatsApp and not on ANY other channel are slim.

      I’d just follow the existing WhatsApp channels on identity, biometrics, and related topics.

      But I couldn’t find any.

      So I created my own channel last Friday entitled “Identity, Biometrics, ID Documents, and Geolocation.”

      Why should you care?

      Why should you care about my WhatsApp identity channel? Maybe you SHOULDN’T.

      If you don’t use WhatsApp, ignore the WhatsApp channel.

      If you use WhatsApp but have other sources for identity industry information (such as my Facebook group/LinkedIn page), ignore the WhatsApp channel.

      But if you love WhatsApp AND identity, here is the follow link for “Identity, Biometrics, ID Documents, and Geolocation.”

      https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaARoeEKbYMQE9OVDG3a