Harvard Students Build AI Tool That Exposes Personal Data In Seconds Gaylord Contreras | usagoldmines.com

JUST over a decade in the past, the online game Watch Canine allowed gamers to see the names, jobs, addresses and different personal particulars of each human within the recreation simply by having gamers stroll round. Even earlier than the sport, movies had proven glimpses of what it will appear like in a dystopian future, the place everybody’s particulars are accessible by way of “future tech”.

In 2024 with quickly rising synthetic intelligence (AI) know-how, two Harvard college students have proven that the aforementioned future has already arrived.

AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio have developed an alarming demo utilizing facial recognition tech to immediately extract and collate private particulars of everybody of their subject of view through the use of sensible glasses.

Nearly like a cherry on prime of the unsettling cake, the duo did it through the use of publicly accessible databases and simply obtainable know-how like Meta’s Ray-Ban sensible glasses.

Posted on X, AnhPhu captions the video of the demo by saying: “Are we prepared for a world the place our knowledge is uncovered at a look?”

Unholy tech marriage

Calling it I-Xray, their tech works through the use of the sensible glasses’ capacity to livestream video to Instagram and as that’s occurring, a pc program is educated on the stream to make use of AI to establish faces in entrance of the wearer.

In what seems to be lower than 5 seconds, faces which are efficiently scanned are then fed right into a public database. Info such because the captured particular person’s names, addresses and cellphone numbers are then despatched to a cellphone app.

AnhPhu and Ardayfio present how briskly the complete course of takes of their video, by which they use their tech on their buddies and even full strangers.

Throughout a number of cases, AnhPhu makes use of the knowledge gleaned to start out conversations with the latter group, pretending to know them through the use of the knowledge obtained by way of I-Xray.

Privateness issues and moral implications

Although facial recognition know-how is nothing new, the true hazard is how it’s getting used right here in tandem with shopper devices reminiscent of normal Android telephones and sensible glasses with discreet recording capabilities.

For Meta, the corporate stresses that customers of its sensible glasses to “respect individuals’s preferences” as a part of its privateness coverage. Additionally they recommend customers to make use of gestures or voice controls when recording, stay streaming or snapping footage.

Regardless of what the coverage states, it finally indicators the corporate washing its fingers and pushing accountability onto customers to really use the Ray-Bans ethically and morally.

“The aim of constructing this device just isn’t for misuse and we aren’t releasing it,” AnhPhu and Ardafiyo wrote in a doc concerning I-Xray.

As an alternative, the scholars say their objective is to lift consciousness over the present state of AI and know-how. The Harvard duo have additionally supplied how individuals can take proactive steps to guard themselves by limiting the details about oneself out there on-line as trying to utterly scrub an individual’s digital footprint is an train in futility.