Meta's new AR glasses, Orion, may have been the talk of the town this past week, but a project from two Harvard students is bringing Meta's Smart Glasses from Ray-Ban into the spotlight again. And this time, in a slightly terrifying manner.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses contain an HD camera and a speaker for handsfree digital life. Users can take calls, listen to music, as well as capture and livestream photos and videos using the glasses.

The demo, created by students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, shows how you can use the footage from the glasses combined with facial recognition software to dox complete strangers on the street. While all the tech behind the project has existed for years, the demo still manages to create feelings of unease, perhaps because most people didn't realize that not only the tech exists right now, but it's so easy even for civilians to make it. Many users are calling the tech dystopian, because that's how most of us imagined it. But it's here right now.

AnhPhu Nguyen shared a video on X (formerly, Twitter), showcasing the tech, called I-XRAY, in action.

The tech uses the camera from the glasses to livestream the video to their Instagram, where they've employed a computer program to monitor the stream and identify any faces using AI.

Once the faces are identified, they're fed to facial recignition models like PimEyes which can match the photo with the publicly available photos of the person across the Internet. The photos are then further fed to LLMs to extract details about the person such as their name, occupation, etc. which are then further run through publicly available databases to find out their phone numbers and even the first and last digits of their Social Security Numbers.

Like I said before, almost all the tech used by I-XRAY has existed for years – cameras, facial recognition models like PimEyes, databases like FastPeopleSearch and Cloaked.com.

However, what makes the whole ordeal eerie is how inconspicous and immediate everything is. The Ray-Ban Meta Glasses 2 used in the video, look just like normal glasses, and while they have a privacy indicator when video recording is on, it can be hard to tell in bright outdoor spaces. So, you might not even notice when a person wearing them is recording you.

But what makes it more unsettling is that how autonomous everything is. The LLM models used make it possible to find information like names and other personal details from different sources on the Internet in the background, without any need for human input. The video shows them doxing someone on the street and casually using information they've found to pretend like they've met them at some community event before.

The whole point of the project is to demonstrate how easy it is for strangers to find your personal information these days. The student duo has not published any code online. Whereas they have shared how you can protect yourself. Apparently, most of these databases have free services to remove yourself from them. But let's be honest, it's almost impossible to completely remove your presence from the Internet. However, you can try to make your information somewhat less available.