“Imagine what you can do with your face” reads the slogan for Facebank, media company that will project a hologram of your face (?) or person or something onto a stage for entertainment. The company went public in October of this year. The company is, thankfully, changing its name per the firm’s website.
The notion of a face bank is concerning. Are we depositing faces into accounts or otherwise lending them out to earn facially-related interest? Can we get the FDIC involved here? As of this writing, the landing page for the firm has an image of Floyd Mayweather, notorious for many things including pushing a cryptocurrency for which he was sanctioned by the SEC – the kind of negative press that would otherwise prevent him from being the, ahem, face of any bank.
Deserving of honorable mention under the category of Corporate Branding That Evokes Concern is Intrusion, Inc., a cybersecurity firm whose leading offering is TraceCop. Nothing about a company going public called Intrusion, Inc. is chill or otherwise mollifying to those concerned about growing corporate… uhhh… intrusion into our lives.
On the other hand, maybe companies that engage in concerning activity – like being the big data processor for the CIA and NSA – should give themselves more honest names so the citizenry can be duly concerned. “Palantir” does nothing to the average reader to cause concern to its personally identifying data-hoovering business model. Perhaps the firm should be called “Central Intelligence Agency Data Modeling Corporation” so we can be concerned in a measure commensurate with the implications of the underlying business model. They can borrow from Facebank – “Imagine what we can do with your data.”
San Francisco Securities Outlook 