Two Harvard undergrads invented a way to instantly find your home address, phone number, and even your relatives — simply by looking at you. They

Meta’s smart glasses open door to new levels of facial surveillance

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2024-10-22 04:30:04

Two Harvard undergrads invented a way to instantly find your home address, phone number, and even your relatives — simply by looking at you.

They built this facial surveillance machine, which they call I-XRAY(new window) , using nothing more than off-the-shelf Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and publicly available LLMs, databases, and facial search engines.

The students, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, didn’t release the code because their purpose for this project is to highlight how today’s internet, awash with data, has put us on the edge of a world where complete strangers can find your identity and personal information in an instant according to 404 Media(new window) , the outlet that initially reported the story.

Their DIY surveillance kit demonstrates how quickly the battlelines can shift in the fight for privacy. But it’s not too late to protect yourself from facial surveillance. Below, we examine what these smart glasses can do, how they work, and what you can do to prevent people from violating your privacy.

Nguyen shared a video on X showing just how quickly and easily you can find sensitive, personal information using their modified glasses. Just a few seconds after seeing someone, they know where they’ve worked, what they’ve published, and where they went to school.