A screenshot from the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”

The brilliant television series Black Mirror is described as “the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy” by its creator Charlie Brooker. Yesterday, with a handful of new announcements from Apple, the privacy Doomsday Clock just ticked a few minutes closer to midnight.

Hyperbolic? Maybe. But between the new Face ID technology of the iPhone X and the biometric measurement of the latest Apple Watch, users are going to be voluntarily conceding a lot of personal data, and quite passively so. In theory, both are very dangerous things to normalize; but with Apple’s smartphone and watch market share, it may very well become practice sooner rather than later.

So what’s the big deal? We take selfies every day, and Face ID is just a 3D selfie, right?

Well…

Today’s Selfie is Tomorrow’s Biometric Profile

That was a quote from a piece of art hanging in the window of the New Museum in New York City that I chanced upon back in March 2016:

Selfies may seem harmless now, but they are the proverbial foot in the door for lower and lower expectations of privacy. Fifteen years ago, nobody took selfies. If you did, it was as a joke and very few people (if any) would ever see it because you had to develop the film and they were embarrassing. Nowadays, we have high quality cameras within arm’s reach at all times, making it normal to take a photo of yourself. Face ID was just one minute past the introduction of the front-facing camera. The more photos of ourselves we publish on the internet for corporations and institutions to consume, the more we expose ourselves.

Or as famed media/communications theorist Marshall McLuhan put it:

“Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”

Speaking of biometrics, remember how Apple said their latest Watch would be able to detect whether or not your vitals are normal at any given moment? Hand that information over to the proper authorities, and you’ve got yourself a real-time lie detector. Sure, polygraphs are notoriously ineffective and usually not admissible in court (regardless of what TV shows and movies have you believe). The law is constantly playing catch-up with technology, and Apple just made it easier to facilitate government overreach.

You can’t find the boundaries until someone oversteps them

Let’s take a look at Apple’s contemporary, Facebook. Facebook has been honing its facial recognition technology for years now.

So has the FBI.

The difference is that Facebook’s tech reportedly operates at a staggering 98% accuracy, which is far better than the FBI’s because the government database mostly consists of mugshot-style photos and security camera footage. In contrast, Facebook stores billions of first-party-verified photos of its users from multiple angles, backed by a learning program that can continually refine itself with every single upload.

What’s one minute further than Facebook’s database and algorithms? How about a camera phone that is capable of performing an infrared scan of your face and its unique contours? One with a 1 in a million chance of being fooled. One whose camera you use to unlock your phone dozens of times each day, 365 days a year. That’s a hell of a lot of information.

Given a few months and billions of data points, Apple may end up with the most advanced facial recognition software in the world. Apple touts their “neural network” as a benefit, but it should be interpreted as a warning sign.

Not to mention this other potential security flaw that made its way around Twitter concurrently with the Apple Event:

So all the police have to do is hold your phone up to your face while you are in cuffs then? Maybe not the best idea, Apple. https://t.co/Jk7Fz8o7fH

— Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes) September 12, 2017

What’s stopping Apple from going full Black Mirror?

Right now, the only thing stopping Apple from becoming a willing surveillance arm of the government is Apple itself. Giving credit where credit’s due, Apple did once refuse FBI orders to unlock the phones of the San Bernardino domestic terrorists back in 2015. And they also denied a request from the DOJ to wiretap iMessage/Facetime, while in the same breath confirming that they had the capability to read and listen to our conversations (so… thanks, I guess?).

To quell our fears at Tuesday’s Event, Apple did say that the personally identifiable data will only be available locally on your devices.

Appl

Communication scholars are sure to be familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “The medium is the message”. In lay terms, McLuhan proposed that how you convey a message to your audience is just as important as the message itself. For instance, McLuhan believed that television viewers were less objective and less literate than readers of print publications. He states this at around the 4 minute mark of this video:

In the same decade that McLuhan first published this phrase, America experienced its first televised Presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. At this point, not everyone had a television set, so many families were still listening to the debate via radio broadcast. It was widely reported that radio listeners believed Nixon to have won the first debate, whereas TV viewers believed Kennedy won. The difference? Nixon was recovering from an illness and as a result, was pale and sweaty.

Also take for instance the introduction of movie theater advertising from around the same era. At this point, most people have heard tales of Coke’s supposedly subliminal movie advertising (the results of which were later found to be dubious). These days, pre-movie commercials are also accompanied by the sneaky-as-ever phenomenon known as product placement, a practice which has also received considerable backlash. Contrast these two types of movie advertising – one is expected (the time before movies start has always been reserved for advertising snacks and other movies), while the other can appear naturally if done right (consider all movie scenes that take place in Times Square). People receive these types of advertising much differently according to expectations. Studies have shown that product placement plays an effective role in cuing brand recognition.

Utilizing Digital Marketing Mediums to your Advantage

It’s been over half a century since McLuhan shared his pervasive line of wisdom with the world, but it’s as true as ever. With the ever-changing landscape of technology and ways to reach consumers, brands must be careful with how they advertise and take advantage of the channels available to them.

Twenty years ago, search engine marketing was not really a viable industry. Nowadays, brands can bid on individual keywords or groups of them. Search is a pull medium rather than a push medium (in theory, brand messaging can be presented only to qualified users who express an interest in that brand’s product offerings via their search queries). So you craft the messaging of your paid search ads differently from your TV or display ads, which are both mostly forms of push advertising. Within search, you can customize your messaging even further. For example, if someone searches for your brand name, you can tell them about a specific sale you’re having (fall sale, 20% off clearance items, etc.). But if someone is searching for a general product that you sell, you could use your ad to tell them about the benefits of shopping your site instead of going to the competitors (free shipping, widest selection, lowest prices, etc.). The possibilities are as endless as the permutations of words consumers type into that all-important Google search box.

And ten years ago, we didn’t have Twitter or Facebook. The only real ways for consumers to communicate directly with brands were via telephone, email or in-store with other customer representatives. Now, I can post a Tweet to complain about Time Warner Cable service or to commend Chex Mix for being delicious (both things I’ve done in the past year).

Those who work in brand management know the importance of keeping messages on-brand. But on the flip side, the people you reach on Twitter on a Friday night are likely not the same people you would reach with a TV ad placement during a noon soap opera. Granted, that’s an extreme example, but it still hammers home the point that it makes sense to craft your messaging according to who will be receiving it. The barriers to entry for social media marketing are so low that it doesn’t make sense for most brands to be uninvolved (regulated industries excluded). Tweets can be sent out as soon as they’re thought up (and approved).

Super Bowl ad junkies will remember this amazing Tweet from Oreo last year following the in-stadium blackout that occurred. That image was created and the Tweet was approved to hit the web before the lights came back on in New Orleans. To date, it’s received over 15,000 Retweets. Utilizing your channels properly can be a powerful vehicle.

On the other hand, bad social media strategies like Kenneth Cole’s can lead to a backlash. To call it a strategy isn’t too much of a stretch, as Cole himself has mentioned that his Tweets are meant to “provoke a dialogue“. It’s just a strategy that associates negative feelings toward the brand.

Then there’s also this amazing parody Burlington Coat Factory Twitter account, with such gems as this:

Yes it is halfway to the week but since when. #coats

— Burlington Coat Fact (@BurlCoatFactory) September 18, 2013

Apparently, a lot of people were fooled into thinking this was their official account. That doesn’t bode well for their actual social media team and its official Twitter account.

5 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Messaging

So how do you customize your marketing for the social web? Research. Tons of it. Here are 5 quick tips to get you started:

1) Know your audience. Not all social media channels cater to the same audience. Pinterest skews heavily female. Reddit is more techy than Facebook. Keep facts like this in mind when deciding what to share and where to share it.
2) Tag your campaigns! Use your visitor analytics to see what types of content resonate with which audiences. Do Twitter followers tend to stay longer on articles with lots of images? Are email newsletter visitors more likely to read long-form content? Do Facebook users share your content more if they read it before they leave the office?
3) Maintain Brand Messaging. Connect all of your advertising in some way. For example, in support of a single campaign, it may make sense to include the same hashtag across TV, social, and print. For some brands, having a discordant messaging works for them (consider Geico’s multitude of mascots).
4) Don’t be afraid to experiment! Short of creating offensive Tweets for the heck of it, you can test out different formats for your social strategy. Again, the lifespan of most Tweets and Facebook posts are short, so you can accumulate a lot of data in a short amount of time. Test things like the background color of your images, the URL shortener you use, the pronouns you use, etc.
5) Interact with your (potential) consumers! The best way to avoid negative PR or to encourage brand loyalty is to show customers that you’re listening. Responding to valid online complaints, Retweeting compliments, and even Liking Facebook comments can be enough to show followers that people are listening. Airlines (which get truckloads of complaints) are actually some of the best at responding to criticisms. Whether they do anything worthwhile with that information is another issue altogether…

At the end of the day, happy consumers have the propensity to be as passionate about your brand as you are. So perform the due diligence, get your feet wet, and good luck!