A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members. 

The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology, and the pair are not releasing their code, AnhPhu Nguyen, one of the creators, told 404 Media. But the experiment, tested in some cases on unsuspecting people in the real world according to a demo video, still shows the razor thin line between a world in which people can move around with relative anonymity, to one where your identity and personal information can be pulled up in an instant by strangers.

Nguyen and co-creator Caine Ardayfio call the project I-XRAY. It uses a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray Ban smart glasses, and allows a user to “just go from face to name,” Nguyen said.

The demo video posted to X on Tuesday shows the pair using the tech against various people. In one of the first examples, Ardayfio walks towards the wearer. “To use it, you just put the glasses on, and then as you walk by people, the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame,” the video says. “After a few seconds, their personal information pops up on your phone.”

In another example, the demo shows a test on what it describes as “a REAL person in the subway.” Ardayfio looks at the results of a face match on his phone, and then approaches a woman he calls Betsy. He introduces himself and claims the pair met through a particular foundation, presumably referencing something included in the search results.

“In our video, we purposefully added reactions we got from random people on the subway in Boston, acting as if we knew them,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

The video beeps out the surname of the woman, but 404 Media was able to easily identify them based on information included in the demo. That woman did not respond to a request for comment and 404 Media is not publishing her name because it is unclear if she consented to being used as a test subject.

In the demo, the pair say they were able to identify dozens of people without their knowledge. In some cases, the data was not accurate and provided the wrong name, according to some responses in the video.

“The motivation for this was mainly because we thought it was interesting, it was cool,” Nguyen said. When the pair started to show their project to others, “a lot of people reacted that, oh, this is obviously really cool, we can use this for networking, I can use this to play pranks on my friends, make funny videos,” Nguyen said. Then, some mentioned the potential for stalking. Nguyen gave the example of “Some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home.”

Ardayfio told 404 Media that when the pair did show the technology to other Harvard students and people on the subway, some said, “Dude, holy shit, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. How do you know my mom’s phone number?”

FROM FACE TO NAME TO ADDRESS TO MORE

Being able to use a pair of glasses or a smartphone’s camera to instantly unmask someone has been a redline in technology for decades. In her book about the rise of facial recognition, New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill detailed how both Facebook and Google had the technology to use facial recognition in combination with a camera feed, but declined to release it. As Hill mentions, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt said more than ten years ago that Google “built that technology, and we withheld it.”

“As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and, after looking at it, we decided to stop,” he added.

A company called Clearview AI broke that unwritten rule and developed a powerful facial recognition system using billions of images scraped from social media. Primarily, Clearview sells its product to law enforcement. Clearview has also explored a pair of smart glasses that would run its facial recognition technology. The company signed a contract with the U.S. Air Force on a related study. 

Now although Nguyen and Ardayfio haven’t released the code for their project, they have demonstrated in a public setting that it is absolutely possible for someone to use mostly off-the-shelf products and services to build a pair of glasses that automatically dox people.

Nguyen showed 404 Media the glasses in a demonstration over a Google Hangout on Tuesday. He took a photo of Ardayfio, and the system automatically sent his picture to a facial recognition site online. It then scraped the sites where his face was found elsewhere on the web. A couple of minutes or so later, Nguyen’s phone showed Ardayfio’s name, and a range of biographical information such as the school he went to, a program he was previously on, and an essay he wrote.  

In an accompanying Google Doc laying out the project, the pair say I-XRAY uses Pimeyes to lookup peoples’ faces. Pimeyes is a facial recognition service that, unlike Clearview, is available to anyone. It has been used by researchers to identify January 6 rioters and stalkers to unmask sex workers. After uploading a photo of someone’s face, Pimeyes provides a list of faces it believes are a match, and the URLs where those images came from. In the demonstration to 404 Media, the system worked by automatically visiting the Pimeyes website, uploading a photo like a human user would, then rapidly opening the resulting URLs. The test did not work on me because I’ve previously requested that Pimeyes block lookups of my face; you can request a block yourself here.

Those URLs can include things like yearbook archives, profiles on employer’s websites, or local sports clubs someone might be a member of. I-XRAY then scrapes those URLs, and uses a large language model (LLM) to infer the person’s name, job, and other personal details, the document says.

Armed with the name, I-XRAY then performs a lookup on a people search site. These are commercially-accessible data brokers that often store a wide range of peoples’ personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, and social media profiles. They can also include information about the subject’s family members. During the demo to 404 Media, Nguyen said they removed Ardayfio’s home address from the people search site used in case of “crazy people.”

From that, the wearer of the glasses automatically has information that, in many circumstances, will likely be enough to identify a stranger on the street, where they work, where they went to school, where they live, and their contact information. 

“We would show people photos of them from kindergarten, and they had never even seen the photo before,” Ardayfio said. “Most people were surprised by how much data they have online.”

The document says I-XRAY uses a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2. When asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email “that Pimeyes facial recognition technology could be used with ANY camera, correct? In other words, this isn't something that only is possible because of Meta Ray-Bans? If so, I think that's an important point to note in the piece.”

Of course, that ignores why the pair specifically choose to use Meta’s Ray Bans: because in passing, they look just like any other pair of glasses. Nyugen said they decided on smart glasses when thinking of the creepiest way for a bad actor to use this string of different technologies.

The Meta spokesperson declined to comment further, but pointed to Meta’s terms of service for Facebook View, Facebook’s accompanying app for the glasses, which say “You are also responsible for using Facebook View in a safe, lawful, and respectful manner.” Meta’s Ray Bans do include a light that is designed to turn on when the device is filming, indicating to other people that they might be recorded. 

Pimeyes told 404 Media in an email that “we must state that the details provided are quite surprising to us.”

“Our system finds websites that publish similar images but is not designed to identify individuals, either directly or indirectly. The only information our users receive is a list of sources where images with a high similarity rate to the search material are found,” the email added, ignoring the obvious fact that showing a similar face to that in an uploaded image, along with a link of where that face is online, is a way to identify someone.

Last year 404 Media reported on a TikTok account whose owner was using off-the-shelf facial recognition tech like Pimeyes to dox random people on the internet for the amusement of millions of viewers. One victim said at the time they “felt a bit violated really.”

“I think people could definitely take the idea and run with it,” Ardayfio said, referring to the glasses. He added that if someone wanted to stalk somebody else, they could have already done it in a less technical way before the pair’s project, such as using Pimeyes and manually going through the results. “If people do run with this idea, I think that’s really bad. I would hope that awareness that we’ve spread on how to protect your data would outweigh any of the negative impacts this could have.” Those guides are included in the Google document.

This Thomas Edsall piece (gift link) is essential reading. It poses the following question:

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen up to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?

The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters.

Trump has made it clear that on a second term he will undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.

The New York Times gets a lot of deserved criticism here at LGM, but it does publish Edsall, who asks all the right questions in a completely unvarnished way.

Edsall’s exploration of the answer via various academic experts, mainly political scientists, is absolutely worth your time. It’s especially valuable for liberals and leftists who rightly reject the crude moralizing and anti-structural naivete behind responses that assert Trump has probably something around a 50/50 chance of getting re-elected because 45% of the electorate is simply made up of “bad people.”

I mean obviously there are a lot of bad people on the right, but successful populist demagoguery requires certain cultural conditions that go well beyond the existence of a lot of bad people.

A key factor to Trump’s success is what students of contemporary American politics call “motivated ignorance.” Political scientist Gary Jacobson:

Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ‘ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it.’ That is, it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing, but that the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.

When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge.

Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right. Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, “To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.

It’s easy to be sanctimonious about this, but imagine how strongly you would resist any information that would, if accepted as true, lead you to discard a cherished belief that is central to both your identity and your membership in your core social circle. We’ve seen recently, for example, the extent to which ardent Zionists will reject out of hand any and all information that might lead them to consider the possibility that Israel as a society is fundamentally in the wrong in its conflict with the Palestinians — a conclusion which, if accepted, could eventually lead to the identity-destroying conclusion that the state of Israel was ultimately a mistake. There are plenty of people for whom the previous sentence involves a kind of thought crime, and therefore is almost literally unthinkable.

What’s important to remember, when thinking about why Trumpism is such a powerful and resilient social movement, is that everyone has core beliefs that remain as impervious to empirical and moral argument as the idea that Israel was a mistake must by definition remain to the Zionist. In other words, certain beliefs can only be discarded in the context of a fundamental conversion experience, and such experiences are rare.

One consequence of this is that, in a perverse, paradoxical, but ultimately unsurprising way, the very fact that more and more evidence comes forth all the time that Trump is a shameless criminal and lifetime grifter binds his supporters to him even more tightly, because such evidence, if accepted, would threaten their core identities and the stability of their social networks. This evidence is thus either rejected out of hand, or, more interestingly, reinterpreted as evidence that Trump’s attacks on the establishment are so righteous that the establishment is, inevitably, out to destroy him by any means necessary. This is the apotheosis of the paranoid style, related to the observation that paranoid individuals eventually produce at least some of the actual conditions that they initially fantasized about (“Everyone is conspiring against me.”).

Three political scientists, in a paper entitled “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue,” describe this dynamic:

The greater his willingness to antagonize the establishment by making himself persona non grata, the more credible is his claim to be his constituency’s leader. His flagrant violation of norms (including that of truth-telling) makes him odious to the establishment, someone from whom they must distance themselves lest they be tainted by scandal.

But this very need by the establishment to distance itself from the lying demagogue lends credibility to his claim to be an authentic champion for those who feel disenfranchised by that establishment.

Another political scientist, Yptach Lelkes, describes this process as a kind of “crystallization” of politics:

Crystallization describes a world where people’s attitudes won’t be swayed, no matter what new information they get. Campaign dynamics do very little to move attitudes. Polarization is the engine of crystallization.

Intense partisan hostility works to Trump’s advantage in a number of ways, according to Lelkes.

First, MAGA loyalists believe “the investigations against Trump are witch hunts and baseless.” Taking this logic a step further, “people think that the other side is dangerous and that we need someone willing to do whatever it takes to stop them. That is, they think they are protecting democracy by supporting Trump. Finally, in a polarized world, people value policy and partisan outcomes over democracy — they are willing to tolerate some authoritarianism to further their own political goals.”

Edsall goes on to make the crucial point that for decades the Republican party was laying the groundwork for someone like Trump to appear. Political scientist Marc Hetherington puts it this way:

Something important had been occurring for decades at the elite level in the G.O.P. Starting with Black civil rights in the 1960s, leaders started to take positions that would ultimately attract a different party base than the one that existed before.

Next it was opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, with clear implications for women’s equality. Then it was a stance against L.G.B.T. rights. The G.O.P. remained steadfastly religious in its orientation, while Democrats started to embrace secularity.

The thing that ties all these issues together is a stance toward societal change. Traditional or modern, some call it closed or open.

After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 20212, party elites decided the GOP needed to tack toward bringing more traditional out groups into its coalition. This led to a massive backlash in the Republican base:

After the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012, Hetherington wrote, “party elites decided in their autopsy that they needed to take a more open tack in trying to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse base of support.”

Trump, however, “challenged this leadership consensus. Elites lost control of the base right there — but bear in mind that Republican appeals on race, gender and sexual orientation were responsible for creating that base.”

Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant. The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus.

Edsall cites a bunch of evidence for the extent to which support for Trump is fundamentally a function of hostility toward a cluster of distinct marginalized groups:

Trump’s support, they write, is “tied to animus toward minority groups,” specifically “toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.” . . .Interestingly, though, “feelings of animosity toward Democratic groups do not predict favorability toward the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, or Mitch McConnell,” Mason, Wronski and Kane write. Instead, “Trump support is uniquely predicted by animosity toward marginalized groups in the United States.” . . . animosity toward Democratic-linked groups predicts Trump support, rather remarkably, across the political spectrum.

All this may on some level seem self-evident, but Edsall’s syncretic analysis of several sources of Trump’s enduring support — I’m leaving a good deal out — is really compelling, and I encourage everyone to read it.

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