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A frightening new app shows how Meta smart glasses can help you identify a stranger on the street – and find their home address
Enterprise

A frightening new app shows how Meta smart glasses can help you identify a stranger on the street – and find their home address

This malicious program is every stalker’s dream.

Two Harvard students have developed a program for Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses that can identify a person and gain access to their personal information, including a home address.

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, engineering students at the Ivy League school, have released a shocking demonstration of what their program, called I-Xray, can do.

“Some guy could just find a girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media of the specs’ sinister potential.

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, engineering students at Harvard, have released a shocking demonstration of their program’s capabilities. X / @AnhPhuNguyen1
The students demonstrated how smart glasses equipped with facial recognition technology can quickly uncover individuals’ personal information. X / @AnhPhuNguyen1
The team posted a video demo of their I-Xray project online, showing how they used Ray-Ban’s meta-smart glasses to use public databases to identify strangers in public. X / @AnhPhuNguyen1

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can record up to three minutes of video.

The I-Xray program works by uploading the glasses’ footage to PimEyes, a facial recognition tool that uses AI to match a recorded face with any publicly available images on the Internet.

I-Xray then triggers another AI tool to search public databases to retrieve personal information about the person in the image, including name, address, phone number and even information about relatives.

This information is then sent to the I-Xray mobile app.

Advances in wearable technology are troubling those who notice that products are becoming more inconspicuous and making it harder for people to tell when someone is recording. REUTERS

In the video that appeared on Monday

However, Nguyen and Ardayfio clarified that they are not making the program public, saying they only created it to “highlight the significant privacy concerns” associated with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

“The purpose of developing this tool is not to abuse it, and we do not publish it,” the two noted.

To limit exposure to malicious actors using the Meta smart glasses, Nguyen and Ardayfio published step-by-step instructions to help people remove themselves from the public databases the engineers use to obtain of personal information used.

The engineers noted that their work “highlighted significant privacy concerns” and “raised awareness that it is now possible to extract a person’s home address and other personal information just from their face on the street.” X / @AnhPhuNguyen1

404 Media has reported that “both Meta and PimEyes have appeared to downplay privacy risks in the past.”

Meta claims that “the same risks exist with photos” as with images taken with data glasses.

In a statement, Meta told The Post: “Ray-Ban Meta glasses do not feature facial recognition technology. From what we can see, these students are simply using publicly available facial recognition software on a computer that works with photos taken with any camera, phone or recording device.”

They added: “Unlike most other devices, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses feature an LED light that indicates to others that the user is recording. This LED cannot be deactivated by the user and we have introduced tamper detection technology to prevent users from obscuring the sensing LED.”

The Post also reached out to Nguyen and Ardayfio for comment.

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