Harvard students have published a report to highlight smart glasses like the Meta Ray Bans can be used to harvest the personal information of strangers in the street.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio detailed how they connected a pair of the Meta glasses to third-party software in order to identify passers-by. How these smart devices can already be used to surface personal information was detailed in a Google document you can read online.
“Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media. The system has ben dubbed I–XRAY.
Nguyen explained how the cobbled together system works in a video posted on X.
“We built glasses that let you identify anyone on the street,” he says. “The information our tool collects from just a photo is staggering.”
The system uses a series of different tools to link screengrabs taken from the Meta Ray Bans’ camera feed to personal information.
For example, it uses PimEyes, which is a “face-recognition search engine” that can link photos fed into it to ones already posted online. Many of these platforms exist, but the students found PimEyes was “the most effective and accurate to a wide range of people”.
I-XRAY then uses large language model (LLM) AI tools to search through the web pages where these images are posted, to harvest any prescient information.
It is then fed into a tool called FastPeopleSearch, which houses profiles of people, including publicly available information. This is then validated against a lookup on cloaked.com, a tool people can use to check if their data is exposed online.
The resulting profile is then sent to the phone of the person using I-XRAY, and could show the subject’s (or victim’s) place of work, their address, birth date and more.
While the pair have posted a video of this system in action, purporting to show them approaching strangers and starting conversations based on harvested information, it is not clear if this is an actual working system or a proof of concept. The pair say they have no plans to release the software.
“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,” reads the document introducing I-XRAY.
The sliver of good news for UK readers is FastPeopleSearch, one the tools used in this demo, isn’t accessible over here. But are we safe from privacy incursions? Certainly not.
