Students find it shockingly easy to create near realtime Facial Recognition Glasses
Kashif Hoda was waiting for a train near Harvard Square when a young man wearing glasses asked him for directions. A few minutes later, as Mr. Hoda’s train was pulling into the station, the young man, who was a junior at Harvard University named AnhPhu Nguyen, approached him again.
“Do you happen to be the person working on minority stuff for Muslims in India?” Mr. Nguyen asked.
Mr. Hoda was shocked. He worked in biotechnology, but had previously been a journalist and had written about marginalized communities in India.
AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio had created glasses that automatically identify people they look at. Nguyen and Ardayfio are both 21 and studying engineering at Harvard. They said in an interview that their system relied on already widely available technologies, including:
- Meta glasses, which livestream video to Instagram.
- Face detection software, which captures faces that appear on the livestream.
- A face search engine called PimEyes, which finds sites on the internet where a person’s face appears.
- A ChatGPT-like tool that was able to parse the results from PimEyes to suggest a person’s name and occupation, as well as look up the name on a people search site to find a home address, a phone number and relatives.
“All the tools were there,” Mr. Nguyen said. “We just had the idea to combine them together.” Nguyen posted a video of it working. Watching it is creepy to say the least. Imagine walking in public and anyone, at any time, can know exactly who you are and anything you’ve ever said or done.
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