This pernicious program is every stalker’s dream.
Two Harvard students have created a new tool to highlight how easily Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses can be used to identify an individual and obtain access to their personal information, including a home address.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, who are engineering students at the Ivy League school, posted a chilling video demonstration of their program, dubbed I-XRAY to X on Monday.
“Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media about the sinister potential of the specs.
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can record up to three minutes of video.
The I-XRAY program works by uploading the footage from the glasses to PimEyes, a facial recognition tool that uses AI to match a recorded face to any publicly available images on the internet.
I-XRAY then prompts another AI tool to scour public databases to retrieve personal details about the individual in the image, including their name, address, phone number, and even information about relatives.
This information is then sent to the I-XRAY mobile app.
In the video posted to X, Nguyen and Ardayfio are seen identifying several classmates in real-time and even approaching strangers in public using information gathered from the technology to act as if they know them.
However, Nguyen and Ardayfio are not releasing the program and say they only created it to “highlight [the] significant privacy concerns” associated with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
“The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it,” the pair clarified in an additional document.
To mitigate potential exposure by bad actors using the Meta smart glasses, Nguyen and Ardayfio have also released step-by-step instructions to help people remove themselves from the public databases they used to obtain the personal information.
404 Media has reported that “both Meta and PimEyes seemed to downplay the privacy risks” in the parst.
Meta claims that “the same risks exist with photos” as it does with any recording obtained from the smart glasses.
PimEyes, meanwhile, says its technology “does not ‘identify’ people” but only links to photos where users can often find identifying information.
The Post has contacted Meta for comment.
