Like something out of Black Mirror, two students have demonstrated a way to use smart glasses and facial recognition technology to immediately reveal people’s names, phone numbers, and addresses.
The Harvard students have dubbed the system I-XRAY and it works like this: When you look at someone’s face through the glasses—they used Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses—a connected Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform will look up that face on the internet and pull up all the information it can find about the person.
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses have the ability to livestream video to Instagram. A program monitors that stream and uses the AI to identify faces. It extracts a picture which is then fed into public databases. Depending on the online presence of the person, this can reveal their name, address, phone number, and even relatives.
And as if it wasn’t creepy enough already, it only takes a few seconds before that information shows up on the user’s phone.
If you’d like to see this system in action, one of the students posted a tweet on X that shows you pretty much how effective it can be.
Facial recognition is a technology that has quickly evolved. That’s not always a bad thing, but it poses a privacy issue when the consensus from the person in the database is missing. Many people have become used to being monitored a lot of the time that they spend outside, especially in large cities. But when facial recognition adds an extra layer of tracking, or immediate recognition, it becomes worrying.
In 2021 we wrote:
“For an individual to identify another individual would require access to a large database or an enormous amount of luck.”
But, thanks to the advancement of AI, this is no longer true. Identification can be done in seconds, for almost everybody that has an online presence, and just from public databases.
In the demo, the students claim they were able to identify dozens of people without their knowledge, although in some cases the system gave the wrong name.
It’s quite obvious that in the wrong hands this could be used to defraud or track people. The students have no intention of sharing their code, but they are not the first ones to come up with the idea or even make it work.
In 2022, a company called Clearview AI was permanently banned from selling its faceprint database within the United States. The facial recognition software and surveillance company was known for scraping images of people from social networking sites, particularly Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other websites. Clearview’s app was able to show you additional photos of a person—after taking a snap of them—along with links to where these appeared. Now, Clearview sells its product to law enforcement, and it’s also explored a pair of smart glasses that would run its facial recognition technology.
Also in 2022, a company called PimEyes was accused of “surveillance and stalking on a scale previously unimaginable.” PimEyes is an online face search engine that searches the internet to find pictures of particular faces. The search engine uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) for facial recognition combined with reverse image search technology to find other photos of a person published online, based on a picture submitted by the user.
In 2023, the New York Times published a story about “the technology Facebook and Google didn’t dare release” about how the two companies stopped development of technology that used facial recognition to identify people.
What’s changed since then:
- The glasses look like any other Ray Ban so you’ll be clueless about getting identified
- Facial recognition has been perfected even more
- AI can be used to quickly gather and analyze data.
Sadly, there’s not a huge amount you can do to stop someone looking you up in this way. However, there are ways to limit how much information is out there about you. Be careful about how much information you post about yourself online, and as much as possible make sure social media posts aren’t publicly accessible.
You can also check and remove yourself from people databases. The students suggested a few that you can opt-out of.
Remove yourself from Reverse Face Search Engines
The major, most accurate reverse face search engines, Pimeyes and Facecheck.id, offer free services to remove yourself.
Remove yourself from People Search Engines
Most people don’t realize that from just a name, one can often identify the person’s home address, phone number, and relatives’ names. Here are some of the major people search engines:
Scrub your data
If you’re in the US, you can also use Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover to help find and remove your personal information from data broker sites.