Harvard students create smart glasses that can instantly dox anyone who sees them

My father used to tell me that "On the Internet, no one knows that you're a hound." Sadly, dear old dad, the times have changed since the days of online anonymity. A sufficiently motivated individual can easily discover that you are not a dog, B) your most likely walk route, and C) much more.

Two Harvard students Caine Ardayfio, and AnhPhu, Nguyen have built a project named I-XRAY, via Interesting Engineering, that demonstrates how easy it is to harness the available technology to find out personal information about anyone you can lay eyes on.

The pair took Meta's smart glasses--specifically the Meta Ray Bans 2 because, hey, those just look like fashionable frames--and linked them up with face search engine PimEyes. By using a Large Language Model, some proprietary code and a Large Language Model, anyone wearing the modified smart glasses can look up someone on the street and have their personal details, such as their name, address and even parts their social security number, sent directly to their smartphone.

Meta has been experimenting with integrating AI in their smart glasses. It's a comfort to know that I-XRAY, like the internal dev kit that was released, will never be made available to a public that is already concerned about privacy.

Ardayfio & Nguyen aren't sharing exactly how they created I-XRAY, but have provided a general description of the steps. Many of the composite elements, aside from the custom-built app that Ardayfio & Nguyen developed specifically for the project are already available. The two explain their motivation for the project in a dossier. They write, "Our goal to demonstrate the current capability of smart glasses, LLMs and public databases. Raising awareness that extracting someone’s home address and personal details just by looking at their face is possible today."

In a video posted by AnhPhu, the pair use the glasses to access old photos of classmates, and even start a conversation with strangers, as if they had met before. I-XRAY is not always accurate in identifying people. In one case, it misidentified a student's twin and displayed the wrong name of another.

The dossier of the duo also explains how to remove personal information from the databases that their project uses. The project's opt-out pages for PimEyes, and similar services, are grouped together. However, the entire project has me considering more radical action.

To be on the safe side, I'm considering either wearing a rubber horse-head mask or a heavy anti-surveillance make-up. What do you think?