October 4, 2024

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Students created a way to access personal info via AI and smart glasses.

In a shocking turn of events, someone was able to use a new high-powered tech product for evil. Two Harvard students paired the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with facial recognition software to rapidly identify strangers and compile their personal information from the internet to highlight the privacy concerns that are getting unboxed with easily accessible consumer tech.

In a video posted to X, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they built I-XRAY. The program uses the glasses to capture images of random people on campus and at a train station, identify them through a publicly accessible facial recognition search site like PimEyes, and then use a large language model (LLM) to trawl the web and compile the person’s information. Nguyen and Ardayfio could access people’s addresses, the names of their parents, and photos in mere minutes, and even approached unsuspecting people using the info they collected to make them think they had met before.

The creators said they would not release the code for this program but created it to highlight how it’s possible to build invasive tech with recent advancements like smart glasses and LLMs.

They may not be releasing the code themselves, but how hard would it be for someone to reverse engineer the process, now that the cat is out of the bag?

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll