Two students used Meta smart glasses to quickly identify any stranger on the street.
What’s more, the device finds sensitive information about the person, including home address and contact information. Although the creators say they do not plan to publish the source code for their project, the demonstration provides a glimpse into a very likely dystopian future of humanity where there is no privacy. Anh-Phu Nguyen and Kane Ardaifio, the team behind the project, are Harvard University students majoring in computer science. They often post their technical experiments on social media.
Video in Instagrampublished by Nguyen, describes the creation of an app that transmits visual information from Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses in facial recognition tools like Pimeyes scan the Internet for a face. A large language model then inferred a likely name and learned other details about the person.
«To use it, you simply put on the glasses and as you walk past people, the glasses will detect whose face is in the frame. The camera is used to analyze them, and after a few seconds, their personal information appears on your phone,» Nguyen explains.
The authors named their project I-XRAY. They note that many of the tools used have only become widely available in the last few years. For example, Meta smart glasses with a camera that look like ordinary glasses were released only last year. Similar work with LLM data has only become possible in the last two years. The ability to search for partial social security numbers has reached a new level since 2023. The inventors also say that anyone can demand the removal of personal information from the places where they acquire it.
In the video, the authors approach strangers and act as if they know these people from somewhere after instantly looking up information about them.
«Although it was originally a side project, Kane and I believe that the release of I-XRAY is positive for humanity in the long run. We would hate for only a few people to know about tools like fastPeopleSearch or Pimeyes»,” Nguyen says.
«I think content like the video we created is good for humanity. Thanks to this video, millions of people have seen the potential of reverse image search and LLM technology in a relatively healthy and harmless way. But more importantly, they now know how to control their own data against people who are not like us but have bad intentions. Attackers have always been able to reverse image search, use LLM, crawl websites, and more, but we’re exposing what these people can do to protect themselves,» Ardaifio said.
Pimeyes and Facecheck ID were used to search for faces. To search for personal information, FastPeopleSearch, CheckThem, and Instant Checkmate are available. As for social security number information, it cannot be deleted.
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