These Smart Glasses Know Who You Are, and Much More
Clip: Season 52 | 4m 18sVideo has Closed Captions
Two students created glasses that can identify people on the street, without them knowing.
The facial recognition glasses can pull personal information, like and phone number and even home address from existing online databases.
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These Smart Glasses Know Who You Are, and Much More
Clip: Season 52 | 4m 18sVideo has Closed Captions
The facial recognition glasses can pull personal information, like and phone number and even home address from existing online databases.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- Oh, hi, ma'am.
Wait, are you (beep)?
- Yes.
- Oh, okay.
I think I met you through like the Cambridge Community Foundation, right?
- Oh, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, it's great... - What if you could immediately know the name and personal details of any stranger you passed on the street?
Two undergraduate college students developed a tool that can pull sensitive personal information, like home addresses and phone numbers, from existing databases just by using a person's face, and without that person even knowing it's happening.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio are students at Harvard University.
They set out to build facial recognition glasses using these smart glasses built by Meta, the parent company of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram.
Basically, they wanted to be able to put on the glasses, look at a random person, and identify who they were.
After just four days of coding, they had a working prototype and were trying it on students around campus.
(tone beeping) (student laughing) Even on strangers at a train station.
- Like minority stuff for like Muslims in India at all, or something?
- That's me, yeah.
- Really?
- Yeah.
- Are you (beep)?
- Yes.
- Oh, I've read your work before, it's super cool.
(chuckles) - What's up, man?
- Here's how it works.
Once AnhPhu or Caine puts on these glasses, an LED light turns on to indicate they're recording, and they start to live stream the video feed to Instagram.
Then a bot they built takes screenshots of the video and scans a facial recognition library, looking for a face.
- Once you look at someone, it puts the face into this database that returns links to where that person appears online.
- That database is called PimEyes; a facial recognition search engine that scours the internet to find websites where that face shows up.
- We use some large language models to scrape those websites, all the information, and then guess who it might be on those websites.
- A large language model, or LLM, is a type of artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, that can understand and summarize data into text that's similar to how humans speak.
The LLM suggests a name to match the face, and then that name is used to find more information.
- And then it would put it through a bunch of databases to try to figure out like home address, job, what they enjoy doing, that type of thing.
- And then all of that information, the photos, names, address, and interest, gets sent to their phone.
From beginning to end, this takes about 90 seconds.
AnhPhu and Caine use the free versions of these databases, but they say if they had unlimited access, they could have gotten results in just a few seconds.
The project raises a lot of ethical questions, but it's not illegal.
Some states, like Massachusetts, do have stringent rules that restrict how the government can use facial recognition technology, but that is not the norm across the country.
And the databases themselves can also impose limits.
Once the project went public, PimEyes removed AnhPhu and Caine's access, because they say the students violated the site's terms of service by uploading photos of people without their permission.
But AnhPhu and Caine's goal isn't for this to be used, it's to show that we're already vulnerable to this kind of technology.
- We basically exposed the fact that you can go on the street and pull all of this data.
It was simply like a technical demonstration.
- In a Google Doc accompanying their video, they encourage and instruct people to remove personal information from databases that contain details, like addresses and even the names of relatives.
- All of these databases that we use, they have opt-out systems where you can just go onto their website, verify your identity, and then you're completely scrubbed from those databases.
- Facial recognition software already exists, like the kind used to verify your identity when you're going through a airport security, or to unlock your iPhone, and similar facial recognition technology is being used by some law enforcement agencies, both at the federal, state, and local levels to identify individuals and support criminal investigations.
Though a few cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Portland, Oregon have lost specifically prohibiting city officials, like police departments, from using facial recognition systems.
But AnhPhu and Caine showed private citizens can also use facial recognition software to identify strangers.
They don't plan to take this project any further, instead, they started working with data privacy advocacy groups.
As engineers, they say they've done their job to bring awareness and show that this is possible.
As facial recognition technology continues to advance, questions about data privacy and security will continue to arise, and many may start to use this technology for more than just a demonstration.
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