Harvard students make utterly dystopic smart glasses that can instantly dox anyone they see
My father was fond of telling me, «On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.» Unfortunately, dear old Dad, times have moved on a bit since the era of online anonymity; a sufficiently motivated individual can easily uncover A) you're not in fact a hound, B) what may be your most likely route for walkies, and C) so much more besides.
Two Harvard students, Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen, have built a project called I-XRAY (via Interesting Engineering) that demonstrates just how terrifyingly easy it is to harness available technology to dig up the personal information of any stranger you could clap eyes upon.
The pair took Meta's smart glasses—specifically the Meta Ray Bans 2 because, hey, those just look like fashionable frames—and linked them up with face search engine PimEyes. By way of a Large Language Model and some proprietary code, anyone wearing the tweaked smart glasses can look at someone on the street, and then have that individual's personal details—their name, address, and even parts of their social security number—sent directly to their phone.
Meta themselves have already been noodling on integrating AI into their smart glasses so it's a small comfort that, like that internal dev kit, I-XRAY will never be widely released to the already privacy starved public.
Ardayfio and Nguyen haven't shared exactly how they made I-XRAY beyond broadly detailing the steps involved. That said, besides the custom-built phone app Ardayfio and Nguyen created specifically for the project, many of the composite elements are already out there. The pair explain the motivation behind the project in their dossier, writing, «Our goal is to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, LLMs, and public databases, raising awareness that extracting someone’s home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today.»
In a video shared by AnhPhu Nguyen, the pair pull up old school photos of fellow classmates and even
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