| schema:text
| - I-XRAY, a tool built for Meta's smart glasses, can gather sensitive information about people from an image captured by the glasses.
The software is not being made available to owners of Meta's smart glasses, software developers or any similar products. The tool is not being maintained and was last fully functional in November 2024, according to developers.
In October 2024, two Harvard University students released (archived) details of a new tool they had built that could "dox" — identify personal information about — strangers by using Meta's smart glasses. Snopes readers asked us to look into this tool and whether it really could find personal information just from a picture captured by the glasses.
In a video demonstrating the I-XRAY tool, developers AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio found the full names, addresses, former schools and names of relatives of people they said they had never met while wearing the smart glasses. "Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance?" Nguyen asked in the caption of the video. Though the tool was released in late September 2024 and picked up on in early reporting that October, claims about its use and capability persisted (archived) on social media (archived) into January 2025.
In a Google doc published in September 2024, Nguyen and Ardayfio explained how the I-XRAY tool worked but did not reveal the specific details of how they built it. The document included links to a video showing the tool being used on what the developers said were strangers in real-life settings. On a video call on Jan. 20, 2025, Nguyen shared unedited videos showing the tool working in real time to identify both himself and Ardayfio. According to Nguyen, however, the tool was not being actively maintained and was last fully functional in November 2024. Therefore, we rate this claim as mostly true.
Nguyen and Ardayfio purposefully did not publish the code behind the project, "for reasons of public security and privacy," according to their release document. Nguyen told (archived) a user asking for the code of the project on X that it was "too dangerous to just publish code. This is mainly for demonstration purposes & awareness." This conclusion was also reached by Silicon Valley developers. The New York Times reported in 2023 that Facebook, now Meta, developed similar software in 2017, capable of recognizing a person using a smartphone camera, but withheld it. Google withheld similar software in 2011, according to the report.
The main danger posed by the software is that the people it is used on lose control of their personal information, and that the tool might be used for doxing or other malicious behavior, as noted in early reporting. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defines doxing as: "gathering an individual's personally identifiable information (PII) and releasing it publicly for malicious purposes such as public humiliation, stalking, identity theft, or targeting for harassment."
Alongside the description of I-XRAY, Nguyen and Ardayfio included guidelines for members of the public to delete themselves from the databases used by the tool, rendering it ineffective. These included PimEyes, a website that can find, for example, other pictures of a person and connected information like a name when shown one image, and FastPeopleSearch, a search engine that can find personal information about people using for example their name.
PimEyes said via email on Jan. 14 that its team had not been involved in the development of the I-XRAY tool and "does not support such experiments." According to CEO Giorgi Gobronidze, Nguyen and Ardayfio likely found matches using personal PimEyes profiles, as the company had not provided API access — access to the site's code.
Gobronidze further called Nguyen and Ardayfio's use of PimEyes a "misuse" of the site's technology, according to its terms of service, which says users must use PimEyes only for "private, personal, and legitimate consumer purposes." Eight accounts "potentially linked to the project authors" on PimEyes had been closed, Gobronidze said, and an investigation into the alleged misuse was ongoing.
Nguyen said of the project's use of PimEyes that:
We are confident that what we did was the right thing in order to raise awareness about today's public databases and their potential consequences if people aren't aware of the tech, and personally know multiple people who have gone through this opt-out process themselves.
Meta underscored that the I-XRAY tool was not unique to its product and could be used on any photo. Additionally, a spokesperson said, Meta's smart glasses featured a tamper-secure LED that alerts
To be clear, Ray-Ban Meta glasses do not have facial recognition technology. From what we could see, these students simply used publicly available facial recognition software on a computer that would work with photos taken on any camera, phone or recording device.
Unlike most other devices, Ray-Ban Meta glasses have an LED light that indicates to others that the user is recording. This LED cannot be disabled by the user, and we introduced tamper detection technology to prevent users from covering up the capture LED.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)