Harvard students adapt Meta smart glasses to reveal people's personal data

Words by ITV News producer Shalet Serrao

A pair of Harvard students have used publicly available technology to create a facial recognition tool that can reveal large amounts of information about unknown individuals.

Wearing the glasses, the students were rapidly able to acquire information about passers-by, such their name, home address, telephone number or their family members' names.

Using Meta’s commercially available smart glasses, Ray-Bans 2, the duo's work raises doubts about the company's ability to safeguard privacy.

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio routinely experiment on artificial reality.

Speaking to ITV News, they discussed how they found the motivation to demonstrate the technology, which they call I-XRAY.  

“It originally started as a side project, but by posting it online, we wanted to raise awareness about these fully publicly accessible technologies,” Mr Nguyen said. 

In a video posted on X, the creators can be seen trying on the glasses among friends and members of the public. The technology doesn’t always get things like names right, but it still pulls up details with eerie levels of accuracy. 

Mr Nguyen is quick to point out while the I-XRAY uses publicly available facial recognition software, the product itself will not be made public and that it is not intended “for misuse”. 

“Note that it's not a product, and we have not released any device or code. It's simply a demonstration of what's possible today,” he added. 

Law enforcement agencies worldwide have used similar software by companies like Clearview AI, which uses images available in the public domain for facial recognition and profiling.

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However, what makes I-XRAY unique is the ease with which it can use smart glasses to draw relationships between names and photos from publicly available databases. 

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses has technology allowing it to livestream on Instagram and Facebook.

I-XRAY then makes use of facial recognition technology to match the person being recorded to their images across the internet. It then goes a step further, using artificial intelligence models to scour through vast databases for addresses and other information.

Meta first released smart glasses in 2021, but the recent Ray-Bans, which are on sale for £300, comes with a built-in camera which is invisible to the naked eye, except for a LED light that flickers when it starts recording.

Nguyen and Ardayfio chose to use them because they looked “almost indistinguishable from regular glasses.” 

Nguyen also stresses that they can achieve similar results with a smartphone camera too.

"We don't want this to be a commentary on smart glasses - this project could have been done with a phone camera," he added.

"While a lot of people thought the project was interesting, some had clear concerns that this could be used by bad actors."

In an online document outlining the project, Nguyen and Ardayfio provide methods people can use to protect themselves online.

"We're mostly engineers and build a lot of projects for fun," they say.

In its privacy policy, Meta cautions users to "stop recording if anyone expresses that they would rather opt-out" and to turn them off "in sensitive spaces".

ITV News has contacted Meta for comment.

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