Students modify Meta’s smart glasses to reveal personal information of strangers in real time | Science & Technology Updates
Two students have developed a pair of smart glasses with facial recognition technology to uncover private information about strangers.
One of the Harvard students is seen in a video using the technology to quickly learn details about a woman sitting near him at a train station in Boston.
“Wait, are you Betsy?” he asks her. Betsy is a complete stranger to him until moments 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 conducted the demonstration to showcase the potential misuse of smart glasses.
“Are we prepared for a world where our data can be easily exposed?” Mr Nguyen questioned in a post on X.
Mr Nguyen, a student of human augmentation, and Mr Ardayfio, who studies physics, developed the facial recognition glasses using readily available tools on the market.
They utilized a pair of Meta’s smart Ray Bans and streamed the live recordings to a computer where AI identified when the glasses were focusing on a face.
Based on the initial live picture, the computer gathered more images of the person and searched voter registration databases and news articles.
Utilizing these public sources, the two students swiftly uncovered people’s names, phone numbers, home addresses, and even the names of their relatives.
Meta’s smart Ray Ban sunglasses. File pic: Reuters
In a video shared online, the experiment is repeated multiple times, with Mr Nguyen and Mr Ardayfio testing it on Harvard’s campus, surprising their fellow students.
“What about John and Susan?” they asked one woman.
“They are my parents…” she replied in horror.
Read more: Facebook and Ray-Ban launch range of smart glasses
“This is meant to be a demonstration to raise awareness of what’s possible today with consumer tech,” said Mr Nguyen, stating they will not release the code for how they created the program.
“It’s too dangerous,” Mr Nguyen told one of his followers.
Meta informed Sky News that Ray Bans do not feature facial recognition technology and will emit a sound and light to indicate when recording is taking place.
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The sound and recording light on the glasses cannot be disabled by the user, and if the light is fully covered, the user will be prompted to remove obstructions before capturing a photo or 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,” stated a Meta spokesperson.
