Two Harvard students have created glasses that collect personal information about everyone in the field of view

Two Harvard students, Anh Phu Nguyen and Kane Ardaifio, have created Ray-Ban smart glasses with automated facial recognition technology. In addition, the glasses use this information to track other details about a stranger, including their address, phone number, other photos, and family members. According to the students, they did this to raise awareness of the possibilities of modern technology and they do not plan to make their software public. This was reported by 404 Media.

The students call their project I-XRAY. They used Ray Ban smart glasses from Meta, which are freely available, and the publicly available facial recognition service Pimeyes.

Pimeyes is an open-source facial recognition service. After uploading a photo, the service provides a list of faces that it estimates to be a match and the URLs where the images were taken from.

The students wrote software that automatically takes a photo of every face that comes into the frame, immediately uploads it to Pimeyes, and displays the results on a smartphone.

In the video, the students demonstrate how they used the glasses to recognize the face of an unknown woman in the subway, call her by name, and start a conversation using the information they learned from the scan.

Nguyen and Ardafio didn't invent anything fundamentally new, they just took advantage of technologies already available to everyone and simply optimized their use to demonstrate how dangerous they can be. They also chose Meta's smartglasses for the experiment precisely because of how similar they are to regular glasses.