A Glimpse, Then Your Life: Harvard Project Turns Smart Glasses Into ID Scanners

A pair of Harvard students have turned a science fiction trope into a sidewalk reality. Using off-the-shelf technology, they built a system that allows someone wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses to identify a stranger and pull up their private details in seconds. The project, called I-XRAY, is a working proof-of-concept that exposes how fragile personal anonymity has become.

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio configured the glasses to livestream video to a computer. When a face appears, the system snaps a picture and feeds it to PimEyes, a public facial recognition search engine. That engine finds matching photos from across the web. A language model then extracts the person’s name and cross-references it with public data brokers, compiling dossiers that can include home addresses, phone numbers, and even partial Social Security numbers. The entire process is automated and takes mere moments.

The students stress they will not release their code. Their goal, they say, is to sound an alarm. Their demonstration video shows them approaching unaware individuals on campus and in public, using gleaned personal details to start conversations. The effect is deeply unsettling.

The project places Meta in a difficult position. The company shut down its massive facial recognition system on Facebook several years ago, citing societal concerns. Yet its Ray-Ban glasses, with their discreet camera, provide the very hardware that makes such real-time identification possible. Meta’s terms prohibit privacy violations, but enforcement is a reactive measure, not a preventative one.

Legally, the United States operates in a vacuum. No comprehensive federal law governs this use of facial recognition by private citizens. While the European Union’s new AI Act imposes restrictions, its application to consumers using commercial products is unclear.

I-XRAY arrives as wearable cameras become commonplace. The technical barrier to this form of surveillance has vanished. The tools are affordable, legal, and improving. The Harvard project poses a stark question: will society establish rules for this technology, or will the ability to move through public life unrecognized become a thing of the past?