Meta smart glasses can be used to instantly identify people and access their personal information

Harvard students demonstrate how Meta smart glasses can be used to instantly identify people and access their personal information

Ava Grace

Students from Harvard University have found that Meta's new smart glasses can be used to identify an individual and obtain access to their personal information.

Facebook, in partnership with luxury sunglasses maker Ray-Ban, created Ray-Ban Stories. 

These smart glasses are loaded with a dual integrated five-megapixel camera, a three microphone array and discreet open-ear speakers. Wearers can secretly snap photos and video on the go and have control over some apps hands-free. (Related: Italy bans smart glasses, facial recognition tech after watchdog rebukes local government trials.)

At the touch of a button on the side of the Meta Ray Ban 2, wearers can film up to three minutes of live video, which can even be streamed to Instagram.

Recently, two Harvard students developed a program for Ray-Ban Stories that can be used to immediately identify individuals and obtain access to their personal information, including home addresses.

Engineering students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio posted a chilling demonstration of what their program, dubbed I-Xray, can do.

"Some dude could just find some girl's home address on the train and just follow them home," Nguyen said. "Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance?"

"The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it," said Nguyen and Ardayfio in a document outlining the technology. "Our goal is to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, large language models and public databases. [We're] raising awareness that extracting someone's home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today."

The I-Xray program works by beginning live-streaming on the smart glasses. The live-streamed footage is then uploaded to a program called PimEyes, a facial recognition tool that uses artificial intelligence to match a recorded face to any publicly available images on the internet.

I-Xray then prompts another AI tool that scours public databases to retrieve personal details about the individual in the image, including their name, address, phone number and even information about relatives.

"It's all fed back to an app we wrote on our phone," said Nguyen in the video posted to X.

I-Xray is unique because it operates entirely automatically, quickly allowing the wearer to find information about people they come across.

Jake Moore, security advisor at software company ESET, said: "Glasses enabled to film the public is a 'worryingly dangerous development.'"

"We are seeing technology advancing into areas that are simply not required," Moore said. "Furthermore, when they are adapted to recognize individuals it becomes a scary tool that could easily be abused."

Meanwhile, a Meta spokesperson said: "To be clear, Ray-Ban Meta glasses do not have facial recognition technology."