Last Month Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio created what they describe as “doxing glasses” and they have brought up some major privacy and ethical concerns. Their product “I-XRAY” is a software that was installed onto Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses that is capable of accessing personal information such as name, age, home address, and phone number. Their software works by using facial recognition software along with reverse image searching using PimEyes and a chat-GPT-like tool to organize all the information such as name, occupation, address, etc. Also stated by Nguyen, “This could be done with any regular phone camera and still do the same amount of damage” Nguyen and Ardayfio’s main goal for making this technology was to have it serve as a public service announcement informing people that large language models can generate and access this data quickly. Within the experiment when they demonstrated the technology it seemed as if it was working instantly and on everyone but in reality the analysis took 90 seconds and only worked on about a third of the test subjects.
There are major privacy and ethical concerns associated with this technology. If tools such as I-XRAY become available to consumers on a large scale people will be more aware of what information about them is online. Increased awareness of your online presence would be a short-term benefit for this the larger privacy concerns should not be ignored. There are not only privacy concerns surrounding this information but ethical concerns as well. If an invasive tool such as this one is normalized within society it could very easily lead to misuse in the forms of stalking, harassment, or unauthorized surveillance. Nguyen and Ardayfio were invited to present in a class on privacy and technology and one student asked if it was legal. Their response is that it breaks some companies' terms of service but it doesn't break the actual law. Because this technology violates terms of service, PimEyes removed Nguyen and Ardayfio’s access to the website because they uploaded photos without their consent. Along with concerns about privacy, ethical concerns can arise due to this technology as well. Frequent use of technology such as this one can desensitize people to violation of our privacy, normalization of this technology without regulation can not happen. Other potential ethical concerns that could arise are bias and discrimination. AI such as the one they use for this product is known to show bias against certain racial groups. This could lead to unfair representation when this technology is used for everyday things such as surveillance, job interviews, etc.
This technology is most likely just the start of using facial recognition to identify individuals on a consumer basis and the technology will only get better so is there a way that society can combat this privacy issue? Nguyen and Ardayfio also urge people to be aware of their digital footprint and remove themselves from a list of databases and search engines, such as PimEyes and FastPeopleSearch. Canine Ardayfio stated, “They have no desire to commercialize this particular extracurricular project.” They just want to teach people how to protect themselves against this powerful technology that consumers now have access to. Something that I find interesting about this is that Arfayfio and Nguyen had removed their information from data broker sites but did not attempt to make their faces unsearchable. Apart from being aware of what information of yours is online other solutions are available. One potential solution comes from a company called Reflectacles. Reflectacles uses infrared illumination and systems using 3D infrared mapping/ scanning in order to fool facial recognition systems. A technology such as this could be a potential mediation for combating such an invasive tool. Another solution that is already in place is a law seen in Illinois is, “Illinois has one of the strictest laws in the nation protecting biometric data, which can include data from facial, fingerprint, and iris scans. The 2008 law mandates that companies collecting such information obtain prior consent from consumers, detail how they’ll use it, and specify how long the information will be kept. The law also allows private citizens, rather than just governmental entities, to file lawsuits over the issue.” I think that these strict state-based and in the future, potentially federally based laws protecting our personal information from anyone to access it are a good thing and need to be heavily regulated, at least in the early stages of development.
The invention of the I-XRAY software by Nguyen and Ardayfio really brought the potential issues of advanced facial recognition software to light. Even though their goal was to educate people on their digital footprint and how it can be harmful to not know what information of yours is online, they showed how there is a need for regulations regarding advanced facial recognition.