People are often worried about their privacy, and they take steps to protect it as much as possible, but, what if I tell you that all of that will be futile now? Two students at Harvard University, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, took the liberty of customising Meta Ray Ban smart glasses with the aim of turning it into a facial recognition system, which would identify strangers immediately and dig out their personal information. One can use this information to gain that stranger’s trust and then con them.
The inventors called it I-XRAY and have demonstrated its power to get phone numbers, addresses, and even social security numbers of random strangers in live tests. These customised privacy-invading smart glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, such as their family members.
In a video demonstration shared online, the two students allegedly utilised I-XRAY to identify multiple classmates, along with their addresses and the names of their relatives—all in real-time. Apparently the students don’t plan on releasing this as their aim was to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, LLMs, and public databases, and also to raise awareness that extracting someone’s home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today.
Meta’s Clarification
An official Meta spokesperson issued a clarification on Threads while saying, “Ray-Ban Meta glasses do not have facial recognition technology. These students are using publicly available facial recognition technology, called PimEyes, on a computer.”
The spokesperson added, “What these students have done would work with any camera, phone or recording device. And unlike most other devices, Ray-Ban Meta glasses have an LED light that indicates to people that the user is recording. Additionally, this LED cannot be disabled by the user, and we introduced tamper detection technology to prevent users from covering up the capture LED.”
