Smart Doxing
For years, privacy experts have warned that widely available facial recognition tools could make it possible to do things like dox strangers you see on the street or allow dangerous creeps to immediately look up personal information about women at the bar.
Dystopian? Absolutely — but as 404 Media reports, two Harvard University students just proved how close we are to such a reality.
Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfi successfully implanted advanced facial recognition software into a pair of Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses, allowing users to quickly and easily look up the personal details of random passersby.
The glasses can run other faces it sees through its built-in camera through the controversial facial recognition service PimEyes. Once it comes up with a name, a large language model (LLM) then automatically sources identifying information, which can range from social media accounts, and career details, to addresses and phone numbers.
The project is called “I-XRAY,” and a video of it in action is nothing short of terrifying.
Crossing Lines
Nguyen told 404 Media that the project started because the students thought it would be “interesting” and “cool.”
“A lot of people reacted that, oh, this is obviously really cool, we can use this for networking, I can use this to play pranks on my friends, make funny videos,” Ngyuen told 404 of his friends’ initial reaction.
But soon, the student continued, some peers started pointing out the dangers presented by the tech, specifically the threat of facial recognition-enabled stalking, harassment, and doxxing, something experts have been warning about for years.
Now, the pair say they want I-XRAY to serve as a warning. They’ve vowed not to release it, declaring in an accompanying Google Doc that their goal is “to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, LLMs, and public databases, raising awareness that extracting someone’s home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today.”
These young students aren’t the first to grapple with whether to release a tool like I-XRAY. As revealed by New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill in her book on the shady facial recognition company Clearview AI, both Facebook and Google successfully built facial recognition tools able to quickly identify faces, but ultimately chose not to move forward with the tech due to obvious privacy concerns.
The experiment goes to show how a simple off-the-shelf pair of smart glasses can be turned into a privacy-invading nightmare.
And just because the Harvard kids didn’t release their dystopian creation, it doesn’t mean someone else won’t.
More on facial recognition: AI Company Scraped 30 Billion Facebook Photos So Cops Can Facial ID Anyone