This pernicious program is every stalker’s dream.
Two Harvard students developed a program for Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses that can be used to identify an individual and obtain access to their personal information, including a home address.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, who are engineering students at the Ivy League school, posted a chilling demonstration of what their program, dubbed I-Xray, can do.
“Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media about the sinister potential of the specs.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, who are engineering students at Harvard, posted a chilling demonstration of what their program can do. X / @AnhPhuNguyen1
The students proved how smart glasses equipped with facial recognition technology can quickly uncover individuals’ personal information. X / @AnhPhuNguyen1
The team posted a video demo of their project, I-Xray, online showing how they used Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses to identify strangers in public using public databases. X / @AnhPhuNguyen1
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can record up to three minutes of video.
The I-Xray program works by uploading the footage from the glasses to PimEyes, a facial recognition tool that uses AI to match a recorded face to any publicly available images on the internet.
I-Xray then prompts another AI tool that scours public databases to retrieve personal details about the individual in the image, including their name, address, phone number and even information about relatives.
This information is then sent to the I-Xray mobile app.
Advances in wearable tech are worrying to those who note that the products are becoming more inconspicuous, making it harder for people to discern when someone is recording. REUTERS
In the video, posted to X Monday, Nguyen and Ardayfio are seen identifying classmates in real-time and approaching strangers in public using information I-Xray gathered to act as if they know them.
However, Nguyen and Ardayfio clarified that they are not releasing the program, and say they only created it to “highlight [the] significant privacy concerns” associated with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
“The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it,” the pair noted.
To limit exposure to bad actors using the Meta smart glasses, Nguyen and Ardayfio released step-by-step instructions to help people remove themselves from the public databases that the engineers used to obtain the personal information.
The engineers noted that their work “highlighted significant privacy concerns” and raises “awareness that extracting someone’s home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today.” X / @AnhPhuNguyen1
404 Media has reported that “both Meta and PimEyes seemed to downplay the privacy risks” in the past.
Meta claims that “the same risks exist with photos” as with recordings obtained from the smart glasses.
In a statement, Meta told The Post: “Ray-Ban Meta glasses do not have facial recognition technology. From what we can see, these students are simply using publicly available facial recognition software on a computer that would work with photos taken on any camera, phone or recording device.”
They added: “Unlike most other devices, Ray-Ban Meta glasses have an LED light that indicates to others that the user is recording. This LED cannot be disabled by the user, and we introduced tamper detection technology to prevent users from covering up the capture LED.”
The Post has also contacted Nguyen and Ardayfio for comment.
