AI smart glasses can now reveal your life story

A pair of Harvard students have figured out a way to turn Meta’s sleek Ray-Ban smart glasses into something straight out of a sci-fi flick. Using a custom-built AI platform, they can identify anyone just by looking at them — plus reveal personal details like their address, phone number, and relatives. 

How it works: 

• The I-XRAY platform uses a facial search engine to put a name to the face of anyone you glance at through the smart glasses

• Then, it’ll run that name through more databases to track down other details about the person’s life

• Finally, it’ll present that information in a single, well-organized document

• An eerie video shows the students approaching random people on the street and asking them questions about their lives (i.e. “Did you attend so-and-so high school?”)

• A system that can detect someone’s net worth or level of fame could be next on the horizon

If you’re more than a little freaked out, well, that’s exactly the point: The students say they're not trying to invade people’s privacy — quite the opposite. Their goal is to spark a conversation about safety in a world where the gadgets we wear are getting smarter by the day. 

We’ve been through this before: It feels a little like the early days of the iPhone, when everyone was trying to jailbreak their devices, despite Apple’s best efforts. New technologies always carry risk, which we gradually learn to mitigate over time. The Harvard students say they want to do the same for surveillance threats — teaching people how to protect themselves before it’s too late.