When the Google Glass first hit the news, it was the talk of the tech industry for both the right and wrong reasons. The former for being potentially the next form factor of personal tech, the latter for its cost to performance ratio, as well as privacy concerns. That last one on the list has been demonstrated to full effect recently using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses juiced up with an AI program running on a PC.
Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio shared a creation of theirs called I-XRAY. The gist of what this does is that it uses the aforementioned Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to get a video feed streamed to Instagram. Faces that are detected in the stream using AI are then run through public databases to find details like their names, addresses, phone numbers, and even names of family members. These are then fed back to the phone running the I-XRAY program.
Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance? @CaineArdayfio and I offer an answer to protect yourself here:https://t.co/LhxModhDpk pic.twitter.com/Oo35TxBNtD
— AnhPhu Nguyen (@AnhPhuNguyen1) September 30, 2024
Technically, the application of this system does not need to rely on smart glasses, and definitely not the Ray-Ban Meta ones, as any camera will do the trick. The program was not difficult to make either, as it turns out. Speaking to The Register, Nguyen said that “anyone who can run some simple web automations with ChatGPT can build this”.
The pair says that they don’t intend to release any product or code, but also stress that “bad actors already know how to do what we did”. Instead, the intent of the project was to spread awareness on what’s possible with today’s consumer tech. There’s also a guide on removing yourself from being searchable by such tools.
(Source: @AnhPhuNguyen1 / X, The Register)
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