Harvard student project demonstrates how Meta’s new smart glasses can be used to dox strangers

FILE PHOTO: A couple of Harvard students integrated the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with a facial recognition software to dox strangers in public and pull up their names, contacts, addresses and more.
| Photo Credit: AP

A couple of Harvard students integrated the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with a facial recognition software to dox strangers in public and pull up their names, contacts, addresses and more. They called it I-XRAY and used it to approach strangers and break the ice. 

They were then able to stream this information on to their phone on an app.

The students, AnhPhu Ngyugen and Caine Ardayfio said that they will not be releasing the product but wanted to raise awareness around the dangerous potential use-cases of these technologies. 

In a demo on X, Nguyen explained, “We stream the video from the glasses straight to Instagram and have a computer program monitor the stream. We use AI to detect when we’re looking at someone’s face, then we scour the internet to find more pictures of that person. Finally, we use data sources like online articles and voter registration databases to figure out their name, phone number, home address and relatives’ names.”

The two then went on to demonstrate how they were able to approach a random woman and gained her trust by mentioning her parents’ names and home town.

The smart glasses were hooked onto a facial recognition search engine called PimEyes. 

Meta responded to the project saying that their smart glasses weren’t a product that was exclusively vulnerable to misuse, the software could be connected with any similar camera device. 

However, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses look like regular glasses making it hard for people to notice them.