Two Harvard students demonstrated how, using smart glasses and a facial recognition system, they can quickly find information about a person caught in the field of view of the device: who he is, what his phone number and home address are. Widely available technologies are used for this.
Image source: ray-ban.com
A demonstration video was published by one of these students, AnhPhu Nguyen – they called their solution I-XRAY. It is based on live streaming of video from Ray-Ban Meta✴ cameras to Instagram✴. A computer program intercepts this stream and, using artificial intelligence, identifies faces in the frame. Photos of people are sent to public databases, through which their names, addresses, phone numbers and even relatives are searched. All collected information is transferred to the phone application. In the demonstration video, Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, another student participating in the project, use the glasses to identify their classmates in real time, obtaining their addresses and names. They also talked to strangers on public transport and convinced them that they knew each other based on this decision.
Image source: x.com/AnhPhuNguyen1
Facial recognition technology has been demonstrating frightening accuracy for several years now, and I-XRAY simply chains together several existing technologies. The novelty of the two students’ project is that these technologies are combined with a consumer gadget that is relatively invisible and easily accessible. They do not intend to abuse their discovery, so the young engineers did not disclose the project materials – their task was to show people the availability of such solutions. This is not some dystopian future, but something possible now. The uniqueness of the I-XRAY solution is also that, using large language models, the system performs operations automatically, establishing connections between names and photographs from data sources.
Privacy issues have been particularly relevant in the case of smart glasses since the days of Google Glass – the public did not like the fact that they could record video without their consent. But lately people have become accustomed to the fact that bloggers everywhere shoot videos on their phones. The ordinary appearance of the Ray-Ban Meta✴ further complicates the situation, and the video recording indicator present on them is easy to miss in a public place, and even more so in bright sunlight. Meta✴ representatives called on glasses owners to “respect people’s preferences” and use voice commands when shooting videos, broadcasts or taking photos, although this is not a requirement, but a recommendation. The authors of the project also indicated through which databases the search for a person is carried out – the owners of these databases allow people to exclude records about themselves. But it is almost impossible to completely eliminate your presence on the Internet – you can only make information less accessible.