They built this facial surveillance machine, which they call I-XRAY(new window), using nothing more than off-the-shelf Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and publicly available LLMs, databases, and facial search engines.
The students, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, didn't release the code because their purpose for this project is to highlight how today's internet, awash with data, has put us on the edge of a world where complete strangers can find their identity and personal information in an instant according to 404 Media(new window), the outlet that initially reported the story.
Their DIY surveillance kit demonstrates how canada phone number data quickly the battlelines can shift in the fight for privacy. But it's not too late to protect yourself from facial surveillance. Below, we examine what these smart glasses can do, how they work, and what you can do to prevent people from violating your privacy.
Doxxing people in real time
Nguyen shared a video on X showing just how quickly and easily you can find sensitive, personal information using their modified glasses. Just a few seconds after seeing someone, they know where they've worked, what they've published, and where they went to school.
Their system uses the Meta smart glasses' ability to live stream to Instagram. They created a program that monitors the feed and uses AI to detect faces. Those faces are then fed into PimEyes, a face search and reverse image search engine, to find the person's name and other images of them. Once the name is found, I-XRAY uses AI to feed the name into dozens of publicly available data sources, like voter registration databases, to find other sensitive information. This is all compiled and displayed in an app on their phone.