Smart Glasses Bring Facial Recognition Concerns

Harvard students have demonstrated that "smart glasses" can be used to look at somebody in public and reveal their identities and personal information. Meta, which made the glasses used in the demonstration, say they have adequate security safeguards in place.

The Ray-Ban smart glasses, produced by Facebook owner Meta, connect wirelessly to a smartphone. They include a camera, speaker and microphone and allows a range of hands-free actions such as filming, taking photos and making calls. (Source: meta.com)

Facial Recognition Abused

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio of Harvard University combined a pair of the glasses with third-party software to create a creepy system they dubbed I-XRAY. This included PimEyes, a search engine that compares facial images with those found online. Unlike ordinary image tools, these use facial matching to find different images of the same person.

The system also uses AI tools to quickly search through any web pages containing an image of the person, then cross-reference data from these pages with public records.

In the demonstration, the pair were able to glance at people in the street and almost instantly discover information such as their name, home address, work history and names of family members.

The students say they have no intention of making I-XRAY a real product and instead they want to highlight that this is not a warning of a dystopian future but rather technology that's already available. "Our 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." (Source: sky.com)

Meta Hits Back

Meta has pointed out that neither the glasses themselves nor Meta's associated software have any facial recognition technology and that the research simply involved using the camera. It noted the exact same activities would be possible by taking somebody's photo or filming them in public using a smartphone.

While using the glasses is clearly less likely to draw attention to such activity, Meta points out that the glasses display a light and make a sound whenever they take a photo or are recording. It also notes that the camera shuts off if the light is covered.

What's Your Opinion?

Are you surprised by what the researchers found? Is it a serious risk that people could abuse this capability? How much responsibility should Meta and the various software manufacturers bear for this situation?