Dark Side of ‘Smart’ Glasses: Students Show How They Can Instantly Find Strangers’ Names, Addresses
When a match is identified, an AI system retrieves personal details like names and addresses.
Pushing the boundaries of privacy, two Harvard University students have developed a modified version of Meta’s “smart glasses” called I-XRAY. The system employs artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to identify individuals instantly, disclosing their personal information.
In a demonstration, the students approach strangers and swiftly obtain details such as their names, home addresses, work histories, and even parental information, 404 Media reported.
The creators of the technology, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, are engineers at Harvard University, and they say their “tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it.”
Instead, their aim is to highlight the capabilities of current technologies, including smart glasses, facial recognition, large language models, and public databases. By doing so, they hope to raise awareness about the existing potential to extract people’s personal details, such as their home addresses, merely from their facial images.
Mr. Nguyen shared a video of the technology on X, with the caption, “Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance?” The video demonstrates how the students utilize a combination of market-available technologies to create AI glasses that uncover personal information simply by observing individuals.
The process begins with a pair of Ray-Ban Meta 2, chosen for their resemblance to regular eyewear. Activating the glasses allows them to record up to three minutes of live video, streamable on platforms like Instagram. A program called PimEyes, described as a reverse image search tool, monitors the livestream footage. According to the students, PimEyes can match faces to publicly accessible images found online.
Once a match is identified, an AI system retrieves associated personal details like names, occupations, and other related information. The I-XRAY project utilizes FastPeopleSearch, an online tool capable of finding personal data such as home addresses, phone numbers, ages, and familial connections using only a name and publicly available records or social media profiles.
