This malware is every stalker’s dream.
Two Harvard students developed a program for Ray-Ban’s Meta smart glasses that can be used to identify an individual and gain access to their personal information, including their home address.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, who are engineering students at the Ivy League school, posted a thrilling demonstration of what their program, called I-Xray, can do.
“Some guy can find a girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media about the spec’s sinister potential.
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can record up to three minutes of video.
The I-Xray program works by uploading images from the glasses to PimEyes, a facial recognition tool that uses AI to match a registered face to any image publicly available online.
I-Xray then triggers another AI tool that scours public databases to retrieve personal details about the individual in the image, including name, address, phone number and even information about next of kin.
This information is then sent to the I-Xray mobile app.
In the video posted on X Monday, Nguyen and Ardayfio are seen identifying classmates in real time and approaching strangers in public using information collected by the I-Xray to act like they know them.
However, Nguyen and Ardayfio clarified that they are not publishing the program and say they created it only to “highlight [the] significant privacy concerns” related to Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
“The purpose of building this tool is not for abuse, and we are not releasing it,” the pair noted.
To limit exposure to bad actors using Meta smart glasses, Nguyen and Ardayfio released step-by-step instructions to help people remove themselves from the public databases the engineers used to obtain personal information.
404 Media has reported that “both Meta and PimEyes appeared to downplay privacy risks” in the past.
Meta claims that “the same risks exist with photos” as with recordings taken by smart glasses.
In a statement, Meta told The Post: “Ray-Ban Meta glasses do not have facial recognition technology. From what we can see, these students are simply using publicly available facial recognition software on a computer that would work with photos taken on any camera, phone or recording device.”
They added: “Unlike most other devices, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses have an LED light that shows others that the wearer is recording. This LED cannot be disabled by the user and we have introduced tamper detection technology to prevent users from covering the capture LED.
The Post has also reached out to Nguyen and Ardayfio for comment.
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Image Source : nypost.com