Harvard students make utterly dystopic smart glasses that can instantly dox anyone they see

Attendees at the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses 2nd generation demo area during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023. Meta Platforms Inc. introduced its latest lineup of head-worn devices, staking fresh claim to the virtual- and augmented-reality industry just ahead of Apple Inc. pushing into the market. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images — (Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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 strike up conversation with perfect strangers as though they've met before, thanks to the information being fed to their phones through the glasses. Notably in what the students choose to show, I-XRAY doesn't identify people with complete accuracy, in one instance misidentifying a student as their twin, and completely pulling up the wrong name for another—so, there's that at least.

Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance? @CaineArdayfio and I offer an answer to protect yourself here:https://t.co/LhxModhDpk pic.twitter.com/Oo35TxBNtDSeptember 30, 2024

Thankfully, the pair's dossier also details how to remove your information from the databases their project draws personal details from. Helpful links to PimEyes and similar services' opt-out pages are collated together, but the whole project has me considering more drastic action.

Just to be safe, I'm contemplating either getting really into anti-surveillance makeup or donning a rubber horse head mask at all times. What do you reckon?

Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, spending the last seven working on print publications PLAY and Official PlayStation Magazine. When she’s not writing about all things hardware here, she’s getting cosy with a horror classic, ranting about a cult hit to a captive audience, or tinkering with some tabletop nonsense.