Harvard students have demonstrated the terrifying power of AI smart glasses by making a pair that reveals anyone’s personal information by just looking at them.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayifo created “I-XRAY” by taking a pair of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses which can livestream video to Instagram. A computer program monitors the livestream and uses AI to identify faces. Once a face is found, the photo is fed into public databases to instantly bring up the person’s name, images, addresses, phone numbers, and even their parents’ names. The information is displayed on a phone app.
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
Nguyen shared a video to his X page (formerly Twitter) demonstrating the glasses in which he approaches random people in public and asks them whether they are who I-XRAY says they are. In one scary exchange, he asks a woman waiting for public transport if her name is Betsy and lies that the pair met through the “Cambridge Community Foundation” — where Betsy apparently works.
Nguyen and Ardayifo tried it on dozens of their classmates successfully bringing up all manner of private information on multiple occasions.
“We streamed this video from the glasses straight to Instagram and have a computer program monitor the stream,” explains Nguyen. “We use AI to detect when we’re looking at someone’s face then we scour the internet to find more pictures of that person. Finally, we use data sources like online articles and voter registration databases to figure out their name, phone number, home address, and relative’s names. And it’s all fed back to an app we wrote on our phones.”
Nguyen stresses that the goal of the project is to raise awareness about the tech that already exists today and that this is not some far-off dystopian reality.
“Please note that our goal is NOT to release any product or code,” Nguyen writes on X. “This is meant to be a demonstration to raise awareness of what’s possible today with consumer tech. We also outline a detailed guide on how to make yourself unsearchable by tools like this.”
The project can be read here.
Yesterday, PetaPixel reported that Meta might be using photos taken by user’s Ray-Ban smart glasses to train its AI models.