In Ubisoft’s open-world game Watch Dogs (and its sequels), you can quickly scan any NPC you meet and discover facts about them, including their name, address, criminal record, and so on. And now two people have essentially created this tech in real life using Meta’s smart glasses and mostly off-the-shelf tech and software, providing a scary glimpse at our future.
As reported by 404 Media, two Harvard students have built working smart glasses that use facial recognition technology to automatically identify someone via their face. Not only that, but the glasses then use that information to track down other details about the stranger including their address, phone number, past photos, and family members. According to the two students, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, they did this to raise awareness of what is possible with current tech and they have no plans to release it publicly.
Nguyen and Ardayfio call the project I-XRAY and showed a demo of it in action earlier this week on social media. In the video posted to Twitter, the pair were able to identify multiple strangers without asking them for any details, though some of the data proved to be inaccurate when the duo talked to the people.
“The motivation for this was mainly because we thought it was interesting, it was cool,” Nguyen told 404 Media. Apparently, other people they showed it to also thought it was “really cool” and some suggested it could be used for “networking” or to “make funny videos.” However, thankfully, someone also mentioned to them how incredibly dangerous this tech could be in the wrong hands. “Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” said Nguyen.
As pointed out by 404 Media, this kind of smart-glasses-facial-scanning tech has been around for a few years now. But Google and Facebook, two companies who were working on it, eventually decided to not release their software.
But you don’t need big tech resources and money to build your own Watch Dogs super glasses that can instantly dox anyone you meet on the street. Nguyen and Ardayfio’s I-XRAY uses Meta’s Ray Bans and the publicly available face recognition service Pimeyes to scan someone’s face with hidden cameras in the glasses and then identify them. That info is then used to scrape the web for phone numbers, other photos, family information, and addresses.
“We would show people photos of them from kindergarten, and they had never even seen the photo before,” said Ardayfio. “Most people were surprised by how much data they have online.” One time, they were able to show a stranger their mom’s phone number after simply scanning their face.
“I think people could definitely take [the idea of I-XRAY] and run with it,” Ardayfio said. “If people do run with this idea, I think that’s really bad. I would hope that awareness that we’ve spread on how to protect your data would outweigh any of the negative impacts this could have.” The duo has included information on how to protect yourself in a large document about the project that is freely available online.
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