Meta Ray-Ban: students add facial recognition, enough to identify anyone in seconds

In the “Our students have talent” section, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio managed to transform connected glasses into a facial recognition device, disclosing a wealth of information about the people around them.

These two Harvard University students shared a chillingly efficient project, called I-XRAY. To put it simply, they used Meta Ray-Ban and artificial intelligence to detect the faces of people in the street.

From then on, photos were taken and analyzed to find similar photos on the Internet and various information related to the “digitized” subjects: name, first name, age, address, as well as various details from articles and web pages (studies, parents …).

Whether on the Harvard campus with students or strangers on the subway, the results are stunning and worrying. The information collected via facial recognition would also make it possible to quickly create a link with certain people, by specifying, for example, having known them in this or that place. This is demonstrated in particular by the video shared by AnhPhu Nguyen on Twitter/X.

Via this astonishing project, clearly reminiscent of an episode of Black Mirrorthe two students do not have malicious thoughts. On the contrary, it tends to make people aware of this type of facial recognition and data collection device.

In the Google Doc explaining how the device works that they have developed, they share advice for removing themselves from facial recognition tools or even people search engines.

This all goes back to a phrase we've heard many times over the past few years: be careful what you share on the Internet. The advent of artificial intelligence shows that the development of tools identifying people and collecting data about them is becoming more and more accessible.