Two students have experimented with combining Meta smart glasses and facial recognition technology, allowing them to look up personal details of strangers on the streets. Both 404 Media and Ars Technica report the story.
Two Harvard students recently revealed that it’s possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to “reveal anyone’s personal details,” including their name, address, and phone number, “just from looking at them.”
In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses….(quote source: Ars Technica)
In addition to all the personal privacy and safety risks, this proof of concept hack also shows that anonymity on the city streets – long theorized as a defining quality of urban public space – is no longer a given. Due to pervasive tracking technologies and relentless datafication, urban public space has been losing its role of being a vestige where you are not constantly watched, tracked, monitored and identified. Life among strangers is seen as the hallmark of city culture. Is this shaping it in new ways? Some authors have been talking about a new era of ‘face politics’. Of course games of make-belief, identifying and cloaking have always been played in public situations. Makes me curious what new interaction patterns might arise from technologically mediated situations like these.