Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
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It’s often good to use emotion in your marketing.
For example, when biometric companies want to justify the use of their technology, they have found that it is very effective to position biometrics as a way to combat sex trafficking.
Similarly, moves to rein in social media are positioned as a way to preserve mental health.
Now that’s a not-so-pretty picture, but it effectively speaks to emotions.
“If poor vulnerable children are exposed to addictive, uncontrolled social media, YOUR child may end up in a straitjacket!”
In New York state, four government officials have declared that the ONLY way to preserve the mental health of underage social media users is via two bills, one of which is the “New York Child Data Protection Act.”
But there is a challenge to enforce ALL of the bill’s provisions…and only one way to solve it. An imperfect way—age estimation.
This post only briefly addresses the alleged mental health issues of social media before plunging into one of the two proposed bills to solve the problem. It then examines a potentially unenforceable part of the bill and a possible solution.
On October 11, a host of New York State government officials, led by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, jointly issued a release with the title “Attorney General James, Governor Hochul, Senator Gounardes, and Assemblymember Rozic Take Action to Protect Children Online.”
Because they want to protect the poor vulnerable children.
And because the major U.S. social media companies are headquartered in California. But I digress.
So why do they say that children need protection?
Recent research has shown devastating mental health effects associated with children and young adults’ social media use, including increased rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and self-harm. The advent of dangerous, viral ‘challenges’ being promoted through social media has further endangered children and young adults.
From https://ag.ny.gov/child-online-safety
Of course one can also argue that social media is harmful to adults, but the New Yorkers aren’t going to go that far.
So they are just going to protect the poor vulnerable children.
This post isn’t going to deeply analyze one of the two bills the quartet have championed, but I will briefly mention that bill now.
Previous efforts to control underage use of social media have faced legal scrutinity, but since Attorney General James has sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution, presumably she has thought about all this.
Enough about SAFE for Kids. Let’s look at the other bill.
The second bill, and the one that concerns me, is the “New York Child Data Protection Act” (S7695/A8149). Here is how the quartet describes how this bill will protect the poor vulnerable children.
With few privacy protections in place for minors online, children are vulnerable to having their location and other personal data tracked and shared with third parties. To protect children’s privacy, the New York Child Data Protection Act will prohibit all online sites from collecting, using, sharing, or selling personal data of anyone under the age of 18 for the purposes of advertising, unless they receive informed consent or unless doing so is strictly necessary for the purpose of the website. For users under 13, this informed consent must come from a parent.
From https://ag.ny.gov/child-online-safety
And again, this bill provides a BIPA-like mechanism for parents or guardians (and their lawyers) to sue for damages.
But let’s dig into the details. With apologies to the New York State Assembly, I’m going to dig into the Senate version of the bill (S7695). Bear in mind that this bill could be amended after I post this, and some of the portions that I cite could change.
The “definitions” section of the bill includes the following:
“MINOR” SHALL MEAN A NATURAL PERSON UNDER THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN.
From https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S7695, § 899-EE, 2.
This only applies to natural persons. So the bots are safe, regardless of age.
Speaking of age, the age of 18 isn’t the only age referenced in the bill. Here’s a part of the “privacy protection by default” section:
§ 899-FF. PRIVACY PROTECTION BY DEFAULT.
1. EXCEPT AS PROVIDED FOR IN SUBDIVISION SIX OF THIS SECTION AND SECTION EIGHT HUNDRED NINETY-NINE-JJ OF THIS ARTICLE, AN OPERATOR SHALL NOT PROCESS, OR ALLOW A THIRD PARTY TO PROCESS, THE PERSONAL DATA OF A COVERED USER COLLECTED THROUGH THE USE OF A WEBSITE, ONLINE SERVICE, ONLINE APPLICATION, MOBILE APPLICA- TION, OR CONNECTED DEVICE UNLESS AND TO THE EXTENT:
(A) THE COVERED USER IS TWELVE YEARS OF AGE OR YOUNGER AND PROCESSING IS PERMITTED UNDER 15 U.S.C. § 6502 AND ITS IMPLEMENTING REGULATIONS; OR
(B) THE COVERED USER IS THIRTEEN YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER AND PROCESSING IS STRICTLY NECESSARY FOR AN ACTIVITY SET FORTH IN SUBDIVISION TWO OF THIS SECTION, OR INFORMED CONSENT HAS BEEN OBTAINED AS SET FORTH IN SUBDIVISION THREE OF THIS SECTION.
From https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S7695
So a lot of this bill depends upon whether a person is over or under the age of eighteen, or over or under the age of thirteen.
And that’s a problem.
The bill needs to know whether or not a person is 18 years old. And I don’t think the quartet will be satisfied with the way that alcohol websites determine whether someone is 21 years old.
This age verification method is…not that robust.
Attorney General James and the others would presumably prefer that the social media companies verify ages with a government-issued ID such as a state driver’s license, a state identification card, or a national passport. This is how most entities verify ages when they have to satisfy legal requirements.
For some people, even some minors, this is not that much of a problem. Anyone who wants to drive in New York State must have a driver’s license, and you have to be at least 16 years old to get a driver’s license. Admittedly some people in the city never bother to get a driver’s license, but at some point these people will probably get a state ID card.
What are these people supposed to do? Provide a birth certificate? And how will the social media companies know if the birth certificate is legitimate?
But there’s another way to determine ages—age estimation.
As long-time readers of the Bredemarket blog know, I have struggled with the issue of age verification, especially for people who do not have driver’s licenses or other government identification. Age estimation in the absence of a government ID is still an inexact science, as even Yoti has stated.
Our technology is accurate for 6 to 12 year olds, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.3 years, and of 1.4 years for 13 to 17 year olds. These are the two age ranges regulators focus upon to ensure that under 13s and 18s do not have access to age restricted goods and services.
From https://www.yoti.com/wp-content/uploads/Yoti-Age-Estimation-White-Paper-March-2023.pdf
So if a minor does not have a government ID, and the social media firm has to use age estimation to determine a minor’s age for purposes of the New York Child Data Protection Act, the following two scenarios are possible:
Is age estimation “good enough for government work”?
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.
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Back in June I wrote about the Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN), a post-COVID way to digitally exchange information about a person’s vaccination status—not just for COVID, but for any future pandemic.
This effort is being pioneered by WHO.
But as we continue to advance digital health identities, the United States is no longer producing a well-known physical identity document.
It’s the end of an era for a once-critical pandemic document: The ubiquitous white COVID-19 vaccination cards are being phased out.
Now that COVID-19 vaccines are not being distributed by the federal government, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped printing new cards.
From https://apnews.com/article/covid-vaccine-cdc-medical-record-a70eb7f3f32b961eae1a7bf69175ad11
This doesn’t affect the validity of current cards. It just means that if you get a COVID vaccine, or any future vaccine, and you need to prove you obtained it, you will have to contact the medical facility who administered it.
Or, in selected states (because in the U.S. health is generally a state and not a federal responsibility), you can access the state’s digital health information. For example, the state of Washington offers MyIRmobile, as do the states of Arizona, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, and West Virginia.
Sign up for MyIR Mobile by going to myirmobile.com and follow the registration instructions. Your registration information will be used to match your records with the state immunization registry. You will be sent a verification code on your phone to finalize the process. Once registration is complete, you’ll be able to view your immunization records, Certificate of Immunization Status (CIS) and access your COVID-19 vaccination certificate.
From https://doh.wa.gov/you-and-your-family/immunization/access-your-familys-immunization-information
I have no idea if MyIR Mobile conforms to GDHCN; neither the phrase nor the acronym is mentioned on the MyIR Mobile website.
My own state of California has its own digital vaccine record, but frankly it’s kind of clunky. Again, I don’t know if California conforms to GDHCN.
So maybe digital health certifications are not advancing.
Why does everyone think that “me too” is the stepping stone to success?
Let’s discuss:
Years ago I worked at my college’s 10 watt radio station, and therefore had access to a lot of records (yes, this was a long time ago).
And one of those records was so unmemorable that it was memorable.
The album, recorded in the early to mid 1960s, trumpeted the fact that the group that recorded the album was extremely versatile. You see, the record not only included surf songs, but also included car songs!
The only problem? The album was NOT by the Beach Boys.
Instead, the album was from some otherwise unknown band that was trying to achieve success by doing what the competition did. (In this case, the Beach Boys.)
I can’t remember the name of the band, and I bet no one else can either.
Sadly, this tactic of Xeroxing (or Mitaing) the competition is not confined to popular music. Have you noticed that so many recipes for marketing success involve copying what your competitors do?
And of course the tactic of slavishly copying competitors has been proven to work. For example, remember when Apple Computer adopted the slogan “Think The Same” as the company dressed in blue, ensured all its computers could run MS-DOS, and otherwise imitated everything that IBM did?
OK, maybe not.
“But John,” you are saying. “That’s unfair. Not everyone can be Apple.”
My point exactly. Everyone can’t be Apple because they’re so busy trying to imitate someone else—either a competitor or some other really popular company.
Personally, I’m waiting for some company to claim to be “the Bredemarket of satellite television. (Which would simply mean that the company would have a lot of shows about wildebeests.) But I’ll probably have to wait a while for some company to be the Bredemarket of anything.
(An aside: while talking with a friend, I compared the British phrase “eating your pudding” to the American phrase “eating your own dog food,” although I noted that “I like to say ‘eating your own wildebeest food‘ just to stand out.” Let’s see ChatGPT do THAT.)
Now I’ll tread into more dangerous territory.
Here’s an example from the identity/biometric world. Since I self-identity (heh) as the identity content marketing expert, I’m supremely qualified to cite this example.
I spent a year embedded in the identity verification industry, and got to see the messaging from my own company and by the competition.
After a while, I realized that most of the firms in the industry were saying the same thing. Here are a few examples. See if you can spot the one word that EVERY company is using:
Yes, these companies, and many others, prominently feature the t-word in their messaging.
Now perhaps some of you would argue that trust is essential to identity verification in the same way that water is essential to an ocean, and that therefore EVERYBODY HAS to use the t-word in their communications.
Don’t tell that to Black Ink Tech, who uses the trademark “Truth Over Trust.”
And no, they didn’t violate any law by using an unapproved word. Instead, they got attention by standing out from the crowd.
Here’s another example that I can’t discuss fully, but I’ll say what I can.
I was talking to a Bredemarket biometric content prospect (not one of the ones listed above), and as is my practice, I started by asking the “why” question.
After all, if I was going to create content for this prospect, we had to ensure that the content stood out from their competitors.
Without revealing confidential information, I can say that I asked the firm why they were better than every other firm out there, and why all the other firms sucked. And the firm provided me with a compelling answer to that question. I can’t reveal that answer, but you can probably guess that the word “trust” was not involved.
So let me ask you:
Why is YOUR firm better than every other firm out there, and why do all or YOUR competitors suck?
Your firm’s survival may depend upon communicating that answer.
Take care of yourself, and each other.
(Updated blog post count 10/23/2023)
Identity and biometrics firms can achieve quantifiable benefits with prospects by blogging. Over 40 identity and biometrics firms are already blogging. Is yours?
My recent post “The Secret to Beating Half of All Fortune 500 Marketers and Growing Your Business” lists 14 quantifiable benefits from the fresh content from blogging, derived from an infographic at Daily Infographic. Here are the most important four:
Blogging adds value.
These firms (and probably many more) already recognize the value of identity blog post writing, and some of them are blogging frequently to get valuable content to their prospects and customers.
Is your firm on the list? If so, how frequently do you update your blog?
If you need help writing blog posts so that your identity/biometrics firm stands out, I, John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket, can help.
My identity blog post writing experience benefits firms who identify individuals via fingers, faces, irises, DNA, driver’s licenses, geolocation, and many other factors and modalities. I truly am a biometric content marketing expert and an identity content marketing expert.
A few more things about my blogging offering:
In most cases, I can provide your blog post via my standard package, the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service. I offer other packages and options if you have special needs.
Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.
To discuss your identity/biometrics blog post needs further, book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket. On the questionnaire, select the Identity/biometrics industry and Blog post content.
In case you missed it…
But are computerized systems any better, and can they detect spoofed voices?
Well, in the same way that fingerprint readers worked to overcome gummy bears, voice readers are working to overcome deepfake voices.
This is only the beginning of the war against voice spoofing. Other companies will pioneer new advances that will tell the real voices from the fake ones.
As for independent testing:
For the rest of the story, see “We Survived Gummy Fingers. We’re Surviving Facial Recognition Inaccuracy. We’ll Survive Voice Spoofing.”
In case you missed it…
Let’s address two items before we continue. Trust me; it’s important.
For the rest of the story, see “We Survived Gummy Fingers. We’re Surviving Facial Recognition Inaccuracy. We’ll Survive Voice Spoofing.”
In case you missed it…
My recent post “Why Apple Vision Pro Is a Technological Biometric Advance, but Not a Revolutionary Biometric Event” included the following sentence:
But the iris security was breached by a “dummy eye” just a month later, in the same way that gummy fingers and face masks have defeated other biometric technologies.From https://bredemarket.com/2023/06/12/vision-pro-not-revolutionary-biometrics-event/
A biometrics industry colleague noticed the rhyming words “dummy” and “gummy” and wondered if the latter was a typo. It turns out it wasn’t.
Back in 2002, researcher Tsutomu Matsumoto used “gummy bears” gelatin to create a fake finger that fooled a fingerprint reader.
Back in 2002, this news WAS really “scary,” since it suggested that you could access a fingerprint reader-protected site with something that wasn’t a finger. Gelatin. A piece of metal. A photograph.
Except that the fingerprint reader world didn’t stand still after 2002, and the industry developed ways to detect spoofed fingers.
For the rest of the story, see “We Survived Gummy Fingers. We’re Surviving Facial Recognition Inaccuracy. We’ll Survive Voice Spoofing.”
Yes, I’m stealing the Biometric Update practice of combining multiple items into a single post, but this lets me take a brief break from identity (mostly) and examine three general technology stories:
First, let’s define “neuroprosthetics/neuroprosthesis”:
Neuroprosthetics “is a discipline related to neuroscience and biomedical engineering concerned with developing neural prostheses, artificial devices to replace or improve the function of an impaired nervous system.
From: Neuromodulation (Second Edition), 2018
Various news sources highlighted the story of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient Pat Bennett and her somewhat-enhanced ability to formulate words, resulting from research at Stanford University.
Because I was curious, I sought the Nature article that discussed the research in detail, “A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis.” The article describes a proof of concept of a speech brain-computer interface (BCI).
Here we demonstrate a speech-to-text BCI that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays. Enabled by these high-resolution recordings, our study participant—who can no longer speak intelligibly owing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—achieved a 9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary (2.7 times fewer errors than the previous state-of-the-art speech BCI2) and a 23.8% word error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary (the first successful demonstration, to our knowledge, of large-vocabulary decoding). Our participant’s attempted speech was decoded at 62 words per minute, which is 3.4 times as fast as the previous record8 and begins to approach the speed of natural conversation (160 words per minute9).
From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06377-x
While a 125,000 word vocabulary is impressive (most adult native English speakers have a vocabulary of 20,000-35,000 words), a 76.2% accuracy rate is so-so.
Stanford Medicine published a more lay-oriented article and a video that described Bennett’s condition, and the results of the study.
For Bennett, the (ALS) deterioration began not in her spinal cord, as is typical, but in her brain stem. She can still move around, dress herself and use her fingers to type, albeit with increasing difficulty. But she can no longer use the muscles of her lips, tongue, larynx and jaws to enunciate clearly the phonemes — or units of sound, such as sh — that are the building blocks of speech….
After four months, Bennett’s attempted utterances were being converted into words on a computer screen at 62 words per minute — more than three times as fast as the previous record for BCI-assisted communication.
From https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/08/brain-implant-speech-als.html
Now let’s shift to companies that need to produce marketing collateral. Bredemarket produces collateral, but not to the scale that big companies need to produce. A single company may have to produce millions of pieces of collateral, each of which is specific to a particular product, in a particular region, for a particular audience/persona. Even Bredemarket could potentially produce all sorts of content, if it weren’t so difficult to do so:
All of this specialized content, using all of these different image and video formats? I’m not gonna create all that.
But as KBWEB Consult (a boutique technology consulting firm specializing in the implementation and delivery of Adobe Enterprise Cloud technologies) points out in its article “Implementing Rapid Omnichannel Messaging with AEM Dynamic Media,” Adobe Experience Manager has tools to speed up this process and create correctly-messaged content in ALL the formats for ALL the audiences.
One of those tools is Dynamic Media.
AEM Dynamic Media accelerates omnichannel personalization, ensuring your business messages are presented quickly and in the proper formats. Starting with a master file, Dynamic Media quickly adjusts images and videos to satisfy varying asset specifications, contributing to increased content velocity.
From https://kbwebconsult.com/implementing-rapid-omnichannel-messaging-with-aem-dynamic-media/
For those who aren’t immersed in marketing talk:
The article also discusses further implementation issues that are of interest to AEM users. If you are such a user, check the article out.
I previously said that I was MOSTLY taking a break from identity, but graph databases impact items well beyond identity.
A graph database, also referred to as a semantic database, is a software application designed to store, query and modify network graphs. A network graph is a visual construct that consists of nodes and edges. Each node represents an entity (such as a person) and each edge represents a connection or relationship between two nodes.
Graph databases have been around in some variation for along time. For example, a family tree is a very simple graph database….
Graph databases are well-suited for analyzing interconnections…
From https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/graph-database
The claim is that the interconnection analysis capabilities of graph databases are much more flexible and comprehensive than the capabilities of traditional relational databases. While graph databases are not always better than relational databases, they are better for cerrtain types of data.
To see how this applies to identity and access management (IAM), I’ll turn to IndyKite, whose Lasse Andersen recently presented on graph database use in IAM (in a webinar sponsored by Strativ Group). IndyKite describes its solution as follows (in part):
A knowledge graph that holistically captures the identities of customers and IoT devices along with the rich relationships between them
A dynamic and real-time data model that unifies disconnected identity data and business metadata into one contextualized layer
From https://www.indykite.com/identity-knowledge-graph
So what?
For example, how does such a solution benefit banking and financial services providers who wish to support financial identity?
Identity-first security to enable trusted, seamless customer experiences
From https://www.indykite.com/banking
Yes, I know that every identity company (with one exception) uses the word “trust,” and they all use the word “seamless.”
But this particular technology benefits banking customers (at least the honest ones) by using the available interconnections to provide all the essential information about the customer and the customer’s devices, in a way that does not inconvenience the customer. IndyKite claims “greater privacy and security,” along with flexibility for future expansion.
In other words, it increases velocity.
I hope you provided this quick overview of these three technology advances.
But do you have a technology story that YOU want to tell?
Perhaps Bredemarket, the technology content marketing expert, can help you select the words to tell your story. If you’re interested in talking, let me know.
Bredemarket