Well, this is mildly terrifying. Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio proved, as a safety warning, that you can use a pair of Meta's Ray-Ban 2 sunglasses to instantly access the personal data of anyone you see. They pulled it off by simply using face search engines, public databases and an LLM to string the information together. They call the project I-XRAY.

As a frightening example from the demonstration, they encounter a young woman they don't know, and instantly have her home address and her parents' names. In another instance, they're able to quickly gain background information on two strangers on public transportation, then approach them and feign recognition in one case, and acquaintanceship in another. "Hey, aren't you [so-and-so]? We met at [event I know you attended]."

See the demo:

It's not difficult to imagine how bad actors could abuse this technology. Imagine approaching an elderly person, for instance, and claiming that you're friends with his grandson, rattling off enough names and relevant locations to quickly convince him that you're a friend of the family.

"Initially started as a side project, I-XRAY quickly highlighted significant privacy concerns. The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it. Our goal is to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, LLMs, and public databases, raising awareness that extracting someone's home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today."

Nguyen and Ardayfio have posted a Google Doc that shows you how to remove yourself from some of the public databases they accessed in the project.