Two engineering students, Caine Ardayfio and AnnPhu Nguyen, at Harvard University developed real-time facial recognition glasses. They went testing it out on passengers in the Boston subway, and easily identified a former journalist and some of his articles. A great way to produce small-talk conversations of break the ice – you might think.
But the eerie side of this student-built development, made as a frivolous sideproject, is how easily our personal information is available for everyone to use. As the two students stated, all the tools used to develop the glasses were ‘already available’. The glasses are from Meta, which can be used to livestream videos to Instagram and face search engine PimEyes was used to connect the livestreamed face to any content online. They build the code to connect the existing tools and voilá, here they have a surveillance tool many tech investor cannot wait to help fund and develop.
Fortunately, the two students made the glasses with their own educational interest in mind, and are not planning on developing it further. However, the accessibility and ease with which this technology can be made, and the unregulated aspect of our information online, pose serious ethical questions. The two men did not provide any opt-out capabilities to their Boston subway test subjects and violated PimEyes terms of service, barring them from the platform.
‘Frivolous’ student projects such as this one get quite the media attention assuming people are OK with this type of oversurveillence. The media should, however, be asking “how will we be protected from our data being exposed at a glance?” instead of “are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance?”.
See: Two Students Created Face Recognition Glasses. It Wasn’t Hard. at The New York Times.
Image by David Degner for the New York Time, from the original article.