Students identify people on the street

Identify strangers on the street with just a glance? Two students from Harvard University managed to do this. They reprogrammed the Meta Smart Glasses so that they could access all personal data available online in a very short time.

Smart glasses are now hardly recognizable as such. The Meta Smart Glasses, created in collaboration with Ray Ban, even appear fashionable and look like many other glasses on the market.

It is not obvious to people passing by that the person they are talking to is wearing smart glasses on their nose. The result of a test by the two Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio is all the more frightening. Because they managed to reprogram the Meta Smart Glasses so that they could identify passers-by and find out everything about them within a very short time.

Data protection: Do Meta Smart Glasses pose a danger?

The Meta Smart Glasses are actually intended to integrate augmented reality into everyday life. The user's field of vision can also be streamed live directly on Instagram.

If the glasses are active, a so-called data protection light on the front switches on. This should clearly show the other person that the glasses are currently processing data. According to critics, however, this is hardly visible, especially in natural light and difficult lighting conditions.

Two students from Harvard also took advantage of this. For their I-XRAY project, they identified passers-by on the street in real time. In a video at X they show how this analysis works.

The students had their glasses record a live stream and run through a program at the same time. This can recognize faces with the help of artificial intelligence. The two students then had access to the name, address and even telephone numbers or relatives via public databases.

Spy software is easy to imitate

But that's not even the scariest thing about the technology the students have developed. Because like her opposite The Register explain, it is a fairly simple application. “Anyone who can do some simple web automation with ChatGPT can build this,” Nguyen explains. “It's amazing that you can build this in a few days – even as a very naive developer.”

Nguyen and Ardayfio do not want to publish the code for this project because the potential for misuse is too great. However, they point out that you don't necessarily need smart glasses to get all this information.

Because any camera can now be used for this. Afterwards you don't need a lot of programming knowledge. The two Harvard students only needed two or three days to program it.

“Ninety-nine percent of the damage a bad actor could do with this tool is independent of whether they have smart glasses,” Nguyen explains. “Someone could easily and discreetly take a photo of someone from a distance – cameras today have a 50x zoom. They’re really good at that.”

The main problem is that the data is publicly available. Some social security numbers could possibly even be misused.

“Our main goal was to show people what is possible with fairly standardized technology so that people can take control of their own privacy and their data,” says Ardayfio. “Bad guys already know how to do what we did, but we can help the good guys and the public better protect themselves.”

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