New Smart Glasses Project Reveals How Easily Personal Data Can Be Exposed - 1

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New Smart Glasses Project Reveals How Easily Personal Data Can Be Exposed

  • Written by Kiara Fabbri Former Tech News Writer
  • Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • Harvard students customized smart glasses with facial recognition technology called I-XRAY.
  • The glasses identify people and retrieve personal information from the web.
  • The creators haven’t released the code but demonstrated its capabilities publicly.

A pair of Harvard students have customized smart glasses to incorporate facial recognition technology, as first reported by 404 Media . The glasses not only identify individuals by scanning their faces, but also pull personal information from the web, including home addresses, phone numbers, and details about their family members.

AnhPhu Nguyen and co-creator Caine Ardayfio have named their project I-XRAY. By using a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray-Ban smart glasses, the technology allows users to “go from face to name instantly,” as Nguyen told 404 Media.

Nguyen and Ardayfio clarify in a project document that, “The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it.”

They add, “Our goal is to demonstrate the current capabilities of smart glasses, face search engines, LLMs, and public databases, raising awareness that extracting someone’s home address and other personal details from just their face on the street is possible today.”

While the students have not released their code to the public, they demonstrated the smart glasses’ capabilities in real-world scenarios, as shown in a demo video posted on X.

Are we ready for a world where our data is exposed at a glance? @CaineArdayfio and I offer an answer to protect yourself here: https://t.co/LhxModhDpk pic.twitter.com/Oo35TxBNtD — AnhPhu Nguyen (@AnhPhuNguyen1) September 30, 2024

Although this technology isn’t new—404 Media notes that Meta and Google have had the ability to apply facial recognition to camera feeds for years without making it public—its integration into commercially available smart glasses raises concerns.

The project document provides guidance on how to remove personal information from various online sources, specifically focusing on reverse face search engines and people search engines. It explains that it is possible to erase personal data from Pimeyes and Facecheck.id .

It highlights that many people may not be aware that just a name can lead to discovering their home address, phone number, and relatives’ names. The text includes opt-out links for major people search engines like Instant Checkmate as well as a comprehensive list compiled by the New York Times .

Additionally, it addresses the issue of identity theft related to Social Security numbers (SSNs), emphasizing that the main risks are financial. To protect oneself, it suggests enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) for important accounts and freezing credit.

OpenAI Announces New Features for AI Models During DevDay Event - 2

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OpenAI Announces New Features for AI Models During DevDay Event

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
  • Fact-Checked by Justyn Newman Former Lead Cybersecurity Editor

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • OpenAI revealed four main features for APIs: RealTime, Prompt Caching, Models Distillation, and Vision Fine-Tuning
  • RealTime will allow developers to take advantage of the recent ChatGPT voice feature
  • The new features will help developers integrate OpenAI’s models for less cost and more efficiently

OpenAI revealed yesterday new tools for developers to build applications with its AI models during Tuesday’s DevDay event in San Francisco.

According to Inc. , the startup shared four major API (application programming interface) updates: RealTime, Prompt Caching, Model Distillation, and Vision Fine-Tuning. The new features will allow developers to use OpenAI’s new technology and apply it to their own products.

The newest and most innovative API service is RealTime which will allow developers to take advantage of the recently launched voice feature for ChatGPT . The new feature will process audio immediately—it was possible before, but required transcriptions and connecting different applications—and will be faster and cheaper. RealTime is expected to also handle video in the future.

Prompt Caching allows developers to reuse common prompts to reduce costs and work more efficiently. “This can reduce latency by up to 80% and cost by 50% for long prompts,” explained OpenAI on its platform for developers.

With Model Distillation developers will be able to expand and improve the capabilities of smaller AI models like GPT-4o mini, and Vision Fine-Tuning will help applications that rely on images to improve object detection, and process visual content better.

OpenAI shared on its website and developers’ platform more details, examples—including videos and interviews with other companies using the features—, and pricing of the new features. For RealTime, for example, the rates will be around $0.06 per minute for audio input and $0.24 for audio output.

This new announcement comes just days after Mira Murati’s—OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer—and other executives resigning .