Don't look at me: Smart specs and AI reveal personal info in seconds

Meta’s Ray Ban 2 "smart" glasses could be too smart, if not for their own good, then that of the people they are used to look at.

That’s going by research carried out by Harvard University students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, who have built a platform called I-XRAY they say shows how the snazzy specs can be used with AI to identify - or 'dox' - people in view in next to no time.

"The project leverages five established technologies," they said, showing that the glasses can be quickly linked with tools such asPimEyes, a face image search engine, to identify a stranger.

The researchers warned that recent advances with so-called generative artificial intelligence and large language models have made it faster and easier to use such glasses to link an image of someone in view to information available on the internet, meaning that people’s data "could be exposed in a glance."

AnhPhu Nguyen said he and Ardayfio could have an answer, by showing people who to have themselves removed from tools such as PimEyes, where a wearer of Meta’s glasses could quickly put up an image of a person they see and cross-reference it to identify the person.

"Most people don’t realize that from just a name, one can often identify the person’s home address, phone number, and relatives’ names," they warned, noting that this could be used to target financial data. The researchers advised people to make sure they have protections such as 2FA (2 factor authentication) on their logins.