Harvard students demonstrate face-recognition AR glasses using PimEyes
Harvard students demonstrated modified Ray-Ban smart glasses that use facial recognition to identify strangers in real time by scraping images from PimEyes. The demonstration raised privacy concerns among digital rights experts, particularly regarding risks to women and minorities.
What happened
Harvard students Caine Ardayfio and AnhPhu Nguyen adapted Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with computer software to create spectacles utilising existing face recognition technology to identify people in real time. The students used existing cameras on either side of the frame to send an Instagram Live stream to a computer, which took screenshots and uploaded them to PimEyes, a website that scrapes images from the internet to identify people for a fee. The glasses were able to deliver someone's name in just under two minutes using the PimEyes facial recognition search engine and artificial intelligence.
The project went viral in September after Nguyen posted about it on X, formerly Twitter. Nguyen told the Thomson Reuters Foundation the aim was to raise awareness and that they had no plans to commercialise their project.
Reported impact
Digital rights experts raised concerns about this new potential use of facial recognition technology, particularly for women and minority groups and in countries like the United States. Ardayfio stated that the technology created had a lot of complications for privacy.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.