Two students have made a pair of smart glasses with facial recognition technology to discover the private information of strangers.
In a video demonstration, one of the Harvard students is shown using the technology to quickly discover details about the woman sitting near him at a train station in Boston.
“Wait, are you Betsy?” he asks her. Betsy is a complete stranger and he hasn’t heard of her until seconds before.
“I think I met you through the Cambridge Community Foundation, right?”
She smiles, stands up to greet him and shakes his hand.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio made the demonstration to show how easily smart glasses can be used maliciously.
“Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance?” Mr Nguyen asked in a post on X.
Mr Nguyen, who studies human augmentation, and Mr Ardayfio, who studies physics, created the facial recognition glasses using tools that are readily available on the market.
They used a pair of Meta’s smart Ray Bans and streamed its live recordings to a computer, where AI was used to spot when the glasses were looking at a face.
Using that first, live picture, the computer looked up more pictures of the person and then scoured voter registration databases and news articles.
Using those publicly available sources, the two students were able to quickly discover people’s names, phone numbers, home addresses and even relatives’ names.
In a video shared online, the experiment is repeated over and over, with Mr Nguyen and Mr Ardayfio testing it out on Harvard’s campus to the shock of their fellow students.
“What about John and Susan?” they asked one woman.
“They are my parents…” she replied in horror.
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“This is meant to be a demonstration to raise awareness of what’s possible today with consumer tech,” said Mr Nguyen, adding the pair won’t be releasing the code for how they built the programme.
“It’s too dangerous,” Mr Nguyen told one of his followers.
Meta told Sky News the Ray Bans do not come equipped with facial recognition technology and will also make a sound and show a light to indicate to others that the glasses are recording.
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The sound and recording light cannot be disabled by the user, and if the light is completely covered, the user will be asked to remove obstacles before taking a photo or recording a video.
“From what we can see, these students are simply using publicly-available facial recognition software on a computer that would work with photos taken on any camera, phone or recording device,” said a Meta spokesperson.