This Facial Recognition Experiment With Meta’s Smart Glasses Is a Terrifying Vision of the Future

Two college students have used Meta’s smart glasses to build a tool that quickly identifies any stranger walking by and brings up that person’s sensitive information, including their home address and contact information, according to a demonstration video posted to Instagram. And while the creators say they have no plans to release the code for their project, the demo gives us a peek at humanity’s very likely future—a future that used to be confined to dystopian sci-fi movies.

The two people behind the project, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, are students working on computer science at Harvard who often post their tech experiments on social media, including 3D printed images and wearable flame-throwers. But it’s their latest experiment, first spotted by 404 Media, that’s probably going to make a lot of people feel uneasy.

An Instagram video posted by Nguyen explains how the two men built a program that feeds the visual information from Meta Ray Ban smart glasses into facial recognition tools like Pimeyes, which have essentially scraped the entire web to identify where that person’s face shows up online. From there, a large language model infers the likely name and other details about that person. That name is then fed to various websites that can reveal the person’s home address, phone number, occupation or other organizational affiliations, and even the names of relatives.

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