[LINK] Airport to tag passengers

[Roger Clarke]

Someone wrote to link:
>I quite like the current series of ANZ Advertisements on this topic.

At 20:40 +1000 16/10/06, Craig Sanders wrote:
>i don't.  <eloquent description, repeated below> ...

I was depressed by that ad.

It said to me that the marketing wonks have done their research, and 
have established that:
(a)  the public likes quirky ads featuring US-style humour, where someone,
      or maybe everyone, comes out looking like a dork;  and
(b)  the public has heard of security, credit-card-based identity fraud,
      and several kinds of biometrics;  but
(c)  the public doesn't understand what 'security' is about;  so
(d)  the strongly anti-security sub-text of the ad will be missed by
      the 90+% of 'the demographics' that matter to the marketing wonks.

Years ago, there was a story about the IBM senior exec who was 
outside the door of the company's 'data centre' waxing eloquent to a 
big-wig customer about security, when a 'computer operator' coming 
out of the 'computer room' recognised the big boss, genuflected (or 
its corporate equivalent) and held the door open for him and his 
guest.  ['...' denotes terms that indicate how long in the tooth the 
story is, and I feel].  We laughed at the time, but the era seems oh, 
so innocent, now.


At 20:40 +1000 16/10/06, Craig Sanders wrote:
>i don't. i think they're repulsive. i also think they're designed not
>to tout ANZ's attention to security, but to trivialise security and
>to depict anyone who actually cares about security as a short and
>awkward geek who is willing to go through a ridiculous and inconvenient
>rigamarole and still end up locking themselves out - when they could
>have just knocked on the door and asked to be let in, as anyone with any
>sense would have done.
>
>which pretty much sums up the banking industry's attitude to security
>issues (incl. phishing), which is that it's a hard problem to actually
>solve and that it is much cheaper to treat it as a perception problem
>(on the part of customers, whether victims of a security attack or not)
>that can be spin-doctored out of existence.

-- 
Roger Clarke                  http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/

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Visiting Professor in Info Science & Eng  Australian National University
Visiting Professor in the eCommerce Program      University of Hong Kong
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW