by Dan Moren
Turning Meta’s smart glasses into instant people identifiers
From The Verge’s Victoria Song, a fascinating and disturbing project that turns Meta’s smart glasses into a system for immediately doxxing people:
In the demo, you can see Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the other student behind the project, use the glasses to identify several classmates, their addresses, and names of relatives in real time. Perhaps more chilling, Nguyen and Ardayfio are also shown chatting up complete strangers on public transit, pretending as if they know them based on information gleaned from the tech.
It’s really creepy stuff. Nguyen and Ardayfio aren’t releasing the tech behind it, but most of this system is built on top of publicly available information from online databases and LLMs that anyone can use. The pair have also detailed the places you can go to try and opt out of some these databases (but there are a lot of them and not all of them make it easy).
As Song points out, part of what makes this extra unsettling is the fact that Meta’s smart glasses are largely indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses, and the only indication that they’re capturing video (a small privacy light) is subtle and hard to notice in daylight. (At least Google Glass was pretty obvious.)
In some senses, we’ve all gotten used to having cameras all around us all the time, but the even more sobering fact is that if this is what two college students can cook up with mostly off-the-shelf ingredients, it’s not hard to imagine what a giant company or government agency with a lot more resources could do.
Meta, however, seems less than concerned:
For its part, Meta cautions users against being glassholes in its privacy policy for the Ray-Bans. It urges users to “respect people’s preferences” and to clearly gesture or use voice controls when capturing video, livestreaming, or taking photos.
Yeah, don’t be creepy when using Meta’s smart glasses. That’s Meta’s job.