College students use Meta smart glasses to instantly dox people
Two Harvard students have demonstrated how Meta's smart Ray Ban glasses can be used to instantly look up an individual's personal details with facial recognition technology.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to PimEyes, an advanced face recognition search engine, to create technology it named "I-XRAY."
How it works is they stream the video from the glasses to Instagram where a computer program monitors the stream. Then, AI is used to identify faces and scour the internet to look for more photos of the person and look through online articles and voter registration databases to find their name, phone number, address, and relatives' names. This is then fed to an app they created on their phone.
Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance? @CaineArdayfio and I offer an answer to protect yourself here:https://t.co/LhxModhDpk pic.twitter.com/Oo35TxBNtD
— AnhPhu Nguyen (@AnhPhuNguyen1) September 30, 2024
In their video, the two students showed the tech in action, as they walked up to complete strangers and pretended they knew them based on the information they found with the tech.
“The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it,” Nguyen and Ardafiyo wrote in a document.
Instead, they said their goal is to demonstrate the tech's capabilities and "raise awareness that extracting someone's home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today."
Technology such as smart glasses raises privacy concerns as people might not be able to tell when someone is wearing a camera. While Meta's glasses have an LED light to indicate when it's recording, it may be hard to see when outside, as The Verge found.
Meta also released guidelines on how to wear smart glasses responsibly, including respecting people's preferences on being photographed.
For people who do want to protect themselves from being found with facial technology programs like PimEyes, Nguyen and Ardafiyo shared some tips like opting for free services offered by face search engines and adding two-factor authentication to important log ins.
