It may seem like something out of science fiction, but Harvard students have created a program that can identify you – pulling up your name, address, workplaces, names of family and friends, and more – when someone glances at you in the street. The program, dubbed I-XRAY, is a proof of concept designed to raise awareness of the privacy issues caused by facial recognition software, particularly when combined with personal information that’s easily available from public information databases, compiled by data brokers, or simply posted to your social media accounts.
The setup is relatively simple: using a pair of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, you can walk down the street and stream live video to Instagram. That stream is monitored by the I-XRAY software, which recognizes faces in the stream and feeds them into a facial search engine PimEyes or FaceCheck.id. Once identified, the program searches for more information about that name, using AI to put the pieces together and provide a detailed bio. Because the Ray-Ban Meta looks like ordinary glasses – they have a light that indicates when they’re streaming, but it’s very hard to see – it’s easy to record without even being noticed.
We ran tests of photos using PimEyes, and its ability to find additional photos of that person from across the web and the associated information was both impressive and scary. In some cases, it was able to match with photos that were decades old, even when the face was partially hidden.
Read more: See the World Smarter: Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Get Multimodal AI
When someone has access to that kind of personal information, it can be used for scams that we probably aren’t looking out for. Social engineering scams, in which a scammer pretends to be someone they aren’t to trick people into giving away information, can be very convincing. Someone might claim to know you, referencing jobs you had, events you attended, or the names of family members – and there’s a good chance you would believe them, simply thinking you’ve forgotten their face. A scammer could take advantage of that to manipulate you or glean further personal information to use in future scams or identity theft.
What’s particularly disconcerting is that all of this information is already out there, and you may not even know it. Even though I-XRAY creators AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio don’t intend to publicly release the software, it’s not something that would be very difficult to recreate. With a single photo, it's simple to pull information from facial recognition databases and find a trove of personal data. While the Ray-Ban Meta glasses make it easy to do so seamlessly, any photo could be a gateway to a similar privacy intrusion.
Read more: Social Media's Shocking Data Harvesting & Sharing Practices Exposed
So how can you keep yourself safe? It's time to start opting out and submitting requests to remove your personal data. The large facial recognition services offer ways to opt out of their search – though be aware they’ll require you to give them even more personal information to do so. You can opt out of these services with varying degrees of difficulty. Here are links to the opt-out pages for the big three:
You can also request your data be removed from these large online personal information databases:
While you can opt out of these easily on your own, there are a vast number of places your information could be collected, and it's time consuming to submit removal requests to all of them – not to mention keeping track of whether they've removed your data or other sites have picked it up. To make it easier, there are a number of services you can pay to scour the internet and remove as much personal information as possible. These data removal services will do a more thorough job than you would be able to do yourself, but they charge an annual fee to remove your data and ensure it stays offline. Here are our recommendations:
- DeleteMe, one of the oldest data removal services and still one of the best
- Incogni, a more budget-friendly service owned by Surfshark, one of our favorite VPN providers
- Kanary, another good budget option with a free plan that will scan the internet for your personal information and do three automatic removals per month
- Optery, which provides a good selection of DIY resources to remove yourself from online databases without a subscription
It's not easy to keep your information from appearing in these databases in the first place. However, there is some benefit to posting as little personal information as possible to social media and setting your accounts to private, so it’s harder for data brokers to scrape information to add to their profiles.
[Image credit: face ID concept generated by DALL-E]
Elizabeth Harper is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience covering consumer technology and entertainment. In addition to writing for Techlicious, she's Editorial Director of Blizzard Watch and is published on sites all over the web, including Time, CBS, Engadget, and DealNews.
