A pair of Harvard students have modded a set of Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses to not only automatically scan the faces of every person they see, but also use that data to find the person’s name, phone number and even address.
Per a report from 404 Media, students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio launched the project, dubbed I-XRAY, “to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology.” The duo used a pair of commercially available Meta Ray Ban smart glasses as well as the free online facial recognition service, Pimeyes. The duo released a demo video on X, Tuesday, explaining, “To use it, you just put the glasses on, and then as you walk by people, the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame…After a few seconds, their personal information pops up on your phone.” The pair claims that they were able to surreptitiously identify dozens of people in public.
The I-XRAY system automatically uploads its images to the Pimeyes website, which scrapes the web for other instances of their face and returns a list of URLs where it found them. Those URLs can be for anything from social media accounts to employee profiles, archived yearbooks to local news stories. I-XRAY then rapidly opens those URLs and returns the personal data it finds there.
Once the system has your name, it will run it through a people search site, where commercial data brokers sell access to people’s personal information, including phone numbers and home addresses—even information about your family members. In a demo with a 404 reporter, the system was able to surface his name, as well as “a range of biographical information such as the school he went to, a program he was previously on, and an essay he wrote.”
“The motivation for this was mainly because we thought it was interesting, it was cool,” Nguyen told 404. “A lot of people [who were shown the project] reacted that, oh, this is obviously really cool, we can use this for networking, I can use this to play pranks on my friends, make funny videos.” However, others expressed concerns about their potential use for stalking. “Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen conceded.
The privacy implications of this experiment are immensely troubling. We’ve already got companies like Clearview AI who seek to commercially exploit our likenesses with near impunity, and data brokers who leak our personal information like water through a colander. The fact that a pair of college students were able to so easily build a system that effectively eliminates a person’s ability to remain relatively anonymous in public does not bode well for our civil liberties. Luckily, there is a relatively simple solution, at least to foil I-XRAY’s specific threat: simply request that Pimeyes block your image from its search results.
Source: 404 Media