Endless Thread - Dox Glasses

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Kashif Hoda was getting onto a Southbound train at Harvard Square when a young man said he recognized him. The doors closed before he got a chance to ask the young man how, or who he was. A month later, the answer came in the form of a viral video. Harvard students AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardefyio modified Meta's smart glasses so that you can search someone's face quickly, almost without them knowing, and pull up personal internet flotsam that they might no longer remember even exists. Think: pictures and articles from decades ago. Addresses. Voting records. Are we prepared for a future where this tool goes mainstream? Show notes: IXRAY (Google Doc) Two Students Created Face Recognition Glasses. It Wasn’t Hard. (The New York Times) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson, Amory Sivertson, and Grace Tatter.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WDUR Podcasts, Boston. Okay, hello, Ben and Amory. Grace Tatter here on the Weir Technology and Privacy Beat. Go, Grace, go. Okay, so I want to tell you all about this guy I talked to last month. His name is Kasha Fuddha, and he used to work at a biotech company outside of Boston. Unfortunately, not too long ago, he got laid off. Oh, sorry to hear it, Kashif.

A familiar tale. Yes. Indeed, but he actually seems to be doing totally fine with it. He said he's free, liberated from biotech at this point. Kachaf and I resuming. I was in New York, and he was in a hotel in Hungary. Koshav tells me the silver lining of his unexpected unemployment, more time to travel, which he loves to do.

The part of traveling that I began to like, even more than just kind of being in different places and seeing different things, which is amazing. I don't mind at all. But it's just this human interactions that I have that leave a lasting impression on me. Back in September, Koshav had one of those human interactions with a lasting impression. He was waiting for the subway at Harvard Square when a college kid walked up to him. My impression was this is a nerdy guy. A nerdy guy, Koshav thinks, for a couple of reasons.

First, because it's Howard, right? So nerdy guys are Harvard and MIT. There's a bunch of them. So I'm not surprised that they're there. The second thing that jumps out is the glasses on the nerdy guys' face. Aren't we past the phase where glasses automatically make one nerdy? I think that's a really good point. And these actually are pretty stylish glasses.

They're raybans. They have these thick black frames, which are kind of in vogue right now, but they're definitely not subtle. Anyway, nerdy glasses or not, the kid asks him, is this the Ashmont train? Which Kashif thinks is a little strange. So that's what you can see. You're smart enough. You can see when the Ashmont train is coming, right?

Kashv says it's pretty obvious that it's the train to Ashmont because that's the last stop on this train line. Nerdy guy's not living up to his moniker, nerdy guy. Second of all, according to Kashif, very few people stay on this train until the last stop. Ashmont? Nobody goes to Ashmont. And like I said, Kachaf is usually the type of guy who seeks out conversations with strangers. He's looking for those random human interactions, usually. I was not in the mood to have a conversation.

So I was like, you know, whatever. I was like, yeah, this is it. And that's it. That was not it. The young man walks back to a group of other students, including one on a laptop. So there was some commotion. So I looked up to see what's going on. So I saw a bunch of kids sitting there including that guy with a laptop

and they were just excited about something. I didn't pay much attention. Again, this is how these kind of things happen all the time. Howard MIT, kids are doing stuff. As the train, clearly marked as going to Ashmont, pulls into the station, the bespectacled student comes up to Kashif again. And this part is captured on video.

Do you happen to the person working on, like, minority stuff for, like, Muslims in India at all or something? Really? Are you Kashshif? Yes. Oh, I've read your work before. I'm Anfu, nice to meet you. Okay, so Amory, Ben, say you're Koshif, a college kid comes up to you on the train and recognizes you.

What do you think? Happens all the time. I just take out my autograph signing pen because I'm a famous podcaster. Oh, yikes. I've been recognized exactly once and I thought I was being punked and I kept waiting. I truly, I had like a five-minute period of like, like, no. Kasheth had more of the Ben reaction because he also has a background in journalism.

He covers Muslims in India, like the kids suggested in the video. And as journalists, we have a slightly larger than average digital footprint, right? Yes, though I was, for the record, kidding. It's not like the first time I've been recognized. So there's a hubris as well.

My ego got boosted. So Kachaf was into this interaction. He did not mind it. But even though his ego was boosted, he still thought something was a little bit weird. I tweeted about this. Hey, I got recognized at Howard's Quest station. I knew something was off and I just kind of a time stamp this thing. Kashv times stamps it, as he says, and then kind of forgets about it. Until a month later, when a friend sends him a video, that's popping off on X, a video made by two Harvard students. We built classes that let you identify anybody on the street. Koshif was unwittingly part of the students' attempt

at an awareness campaign about the death of privacy. I'm Grace Ray Van Statter. I'm Amory. I actually go to Ashmont pretty often, Sievertson. I'm Ben taking out my autograph, Penn Johnson. And from WBUR in Boston, we're endless thread. And today we're looking at Doc's glasses. Okay, so in this viral video on X that our subway platform star Koshif was featured in, we see these two Harvard students.

And they're demonstrating how they can use these glasses to figure out personal information about their fellow students, other people they see on campus. You're from Bergen County Academies? Your Korean name is Zhu Yun? Of course, we see Kashif being stopped as he gets on the train. Really? Are you Kashif? Wow, Kashif looks like very tickled and also confused.

They also pretend to recognize another woman on the same train platform. I think I met you through like the Cambridge Community Foundation, right? And the video explains how these glasses supposedly work. So here's how it works. We streamed the video from the glasses straight to Instagram and have a computer program monitor the stream. We use AI to detect one we're looking at. someone's face. Then we scour the internet to find more pictures of that person. Finally, we use data sources like online articles and voter registration databases to figure out their name,

phone number, home address, and relative's names. And it's all fed back to an app we wrote on our phone. A little unsettling. Definitely unsettling. Last time I was in Boston, I went to visit Harvard's campus to talk to the students who made this video and these glasses. I'm Anne Feng-Win. I'm a junior at Harvard. my hometown is Baloch in Vietnam. I'm Kane Ardafia. I'm also junior at Harvard studying physics, and my hometown is Indiana.

They call these glasses, by the way, eye-x-ray. They don't call them x-ray bands? That's bullshit, man. Come on. So Anfew and Kane used to run Harvard's VR virtual reality club together, which is how they got the idea for these eye-x-ray glasses. because the club got their hands on meta-ray-band smart glasses, which look like normal glasses but use meta's AI technology.

So you can use them to take pictures and record video. You can listen to music. They're basically like a phone for your face. We just thought it'd be cool to be able to guess people's names on the street. Is that cool? Is it cool? Well, that's what Anfu and Kane begin to ask themselves. They're developing an app that uses these meta glasses to guess people's names, but then they realize how much information can be linked to a face.

So it will pull any, like, instance of where your face appears online. So if your face appears on articles that talk about you, like, your job, what you do, your past awards that you won, like, that went on some random article or the high school you went to, if they posted your name, then that'll show up. And then if you ever leased a home or registered to vote, in certain states, like the home address data is public for you. So it would pull that. You don't need to have any social media for this to have to work on you.

All you need to have ever happened is someone posted a picture of your face with your name tied to it online. So it's kind of like, it's kind of crazy in that way. Whoa. So this is like what we do sometimes as journalists if we're trying to learn more about a source, you know, if we want to. knock on their door or whatever, except instead of searching with just someone's name or known information about them, you're just working with the real-time appearance of the person in front of

you. That's kind of wild. We should say, Grace, that this is a very, very, very interesting thing that Kane and Amphu were unable to demonstrate for you when you actually went to meet them, which, Just to say that out loud, you did not see it in action. True. They actually only used this app when they were filming the video. And they told me that it takes a long time to, like, hook up the server and make sure that it's logged into all the search engines that they used to get this data. Also, the reverse-phase search engine doesn't work on everyone, and the results aren't instantaneous.

Amv told me it takes about a minute and a half for the actual. app to give you information about a person once they've been identified. But that's long enough if you're waiting for the trained at Ashmont. Especially in Boston, yeah. Especially in Boston. So Anfou and Kane are pretty vague about how the app actually works. They didn't get into that many specifics with me that much more than the video. Anfu told me that as in part because they're wary of how this technology could be used.

We made a couple major decisions to basically roll this out. in a responsible way. So the goal was to slow down any bad actors while also allowing people to digest the information in a safe way and then do something about it. So we didn't open source anything, no live product demo online. We didn't sell any software. So we slowed down the distribution as much as possible. In the description for their video, Anfou and Kane linked to a Google Doc that gives instructions for removing your data from a lot of the sources the app uses. So this really was meant to be a cautionary experiment. But how did Kachafhuda, one of the unwitting subjects of that experiment gone viral, feel about it? We'll find out in a minute. Support for this podcast comes from

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Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So we've been talking about an app that two college students developed for META's smart classes. That in theory allows you to just look at someone and pull up all of this information about them. home address, work history, et cetera, et cetera.

I believe they're called the eye x-ray grace, the eye x-rays. Yes. A lot of people on Reddit refer to them as doc's glasses. When Koshaf realized what happened that he had been seen by the eye x-ray glasses, a lot of his friends expected him to be freaked out. I mean, that would be understandable, right? I would be freaked out, yes. Kashv was actually not freaked out.

I was amused. A bit of me was like, yeah, I got a scammed. Again, they didn't take any money or something. I was like, you know, I got fooled a little bit about this because I was feeling good about like, oh, wow, I got recognized like, no, that's not what happened. So being recognized, whether it's actually due to his journalism or whether it's just college kids running some sort of social experiment is not a problem for Kashiv. He was totally blasé about that.

And that made me think about the difference between privacy and anonymity. This is something that also came up a few months ago when we worked on that episode about telegram and signal. Yeah, when we were talking about Signal, Andy Greenberg, who's a reporter for Wired, made this really interesting point that this encrypted messaging app is private because no one can read your messaging, but it's not actually anonymous because you have to sign up with your phone number. Right. So anonymity and privacy are two fairly distinct things. And I kept thinking about that when I was talking to coffee. because basically what he was saying is that he's comfortable not having anonymity. He said that's in part because of the place he grew up, a place where anonymity is basically impossible. I grew up in India at a different world, different era. In a village, everybody recognizes everyone.

Everybody knows about everyone, right? But there are pros and cons of that. One is that community comes around to you when you need them, right? but also that means, yeah, there's no anonymity there. Kashv said that the internet has the power to make the world feel like the village where he grew up. And he thinks that might have some upsides. I believe, and as a journalist, as a creative person, stories happen when we interact with each other. If we're not interacting, we're not being human.

I'm kind of with him, which isn't to say that I'm totally comfortable with the idea. I just more feel like it's inevitable that we live in a society and we interact with one another and we build our networks and those networks have even larger networks and thus we're not anonymous because we're three-dimensional moving through the world, you know? I get that and I like not being too chicken little about this kind of thing. And also at the same time, I think the points that he is made. are about the kinds of community that have existed before a lot of the technology that we're using, which is in some ways, like, isolating and separating. And so it's like a little complicated for me. Yeah, of course, like, if I know something about you because you're my neighbor and I have contextual information, sure, like, yes, I know where you live and stuff like that. But we have, like,

repeated real world connection that allows us to build a relationship that is like based on expectations of safety and sharing space and things like that. Yeah, that's fair. Kashv talked about how where he's from, it wasn't uncommon for someone to come knock on the door who usually a friend or someone who you actually know, but sometimes a stranger who just like maybe was a friend of a friend coming to just like, say hi, see if you're around. This interaction of neighbors or friends coming on and ours used to be such a delight for us. Like, whatever mundane thing is happening is all of a sudden there's excitement in the air.

Anonymity is no one being able to know who you are or come to your door. Privacy is being able to say like, hey, thanks for coming by. But I don't want to talk to you right now. You can't come into my house. you have to stay in a certain part of my house. You have to stay in the front room. Instead of being like, oh, yep, if you've come by and you recognize me, like, come on in and go through all of my drawers, which is sometimes how privacy online feels like now.

Like, we just, like, kind of know that all these companies are rifling through our drawers, even if they got into our house and false pretenses. Oh, I hate that analogy, but it's probably very appropriate. Kasha seems to think that this technology could facilitate these kind of fun, unexpected encounters that he's valued throughout his life, without opening the doors to visitors we don't want. It's how we utilize that technology to either improve our life,

our community around it, our society, or we just freak out and stay inside the house in a bunker and say, I don't want to interact with anybody. That's fine. That's your choice. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a good point. I used to want to have a technology that would exist where like if you were like two cars passing each other going opposite directions, you could beam each other the music you were listening to.

Like I just thought that would be. You just want to beam them your music. No, no, I want to receive theirs too. They want to receive theirs too. I think it would be really cool to be able to like spontaneously share things in ways that like could create joy in connection, even if it's like creating joy in connection with somebody who you're just like kind of like passing. passing by as you're passing through a space.

So, like, I get the sort of more open, joyful imagination of how technology like this could work. What about you, Amory? Do you want a positive version of this technology? Does this give you any ideas for joyful possibilities? Growing up, my dad would give me a ride to school because there were no buses to the high school. And we would see some familiar people leaving their houses at the same time

and at certain points along the commute to my high school. We'd see the same people. And we kind of just, we gave them names. We sort of imagined what their sitch was, you know, what they might do for work, where are they going? You know, ooh, they have a new bag. Maybe they got that at such and such place. And so we'd kind of do the fake version of this anyway,

but it became like a fun, delightful little game where we could imagine who these people were. And I'm just thinking about how sad it would be if glasses like these were normalized, at least in this particular instance, if glasses like these were normalized to the extent that suddenly that's not, you know, Bonnie, I'll just make up a name right now,

that's not Bonnie who works at the library. I know exactly who that is, you know? I'd rather just play make-believe, I think. Yeah, I do think that a lot of the fun in that is the imagination aspect and that our lives are perhaps richer for having some mystery still in them and that we don't need to know everything. Especially because I don't know about you all, but when it comes to privacy, when it comes to like the information,

that might be linked to my face. I feel like you almost have to have, like, a bunker-like mentality if you actually want that privacy, if you actually want to ensure that the only data available to other people is what you want them to have. It just already feels too late. Like, I just know all of my information is already out there. And it seems like you would just have to, like,

yeah, go live in a bunker and throw away your phone and disconnect from society to have true. privacy and I appreciate Kane and Anfoo like putting in their Google Doc how to take your name and your information off of these I think they have like five search engines but it just feels like whack-a-mole because you take your name off of one thing and it's it's just going to show up somewhere else and I don't know what to do about that I really like that point grace and I think we have these like massive technology platforms and I actually think we need massive technology standard enforcement as well. And, you know, regulation. Like, we need to be protected from big tech corporations rifling

through our drawers. Or at least we need to be able to know when they're doing it and have some agency and saying, uh, no, this is not okay. Please stop. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what Kane and Anfu think too. They're basically like, if we weren't going to create this app, somebody else was. And so there needs to be regulation. Here's what Kane said. A lot of. A lot of. A lot of the issues in the world of privacy are not really limited by technology. Like, the technology is all already there in order to do, like, lots, to gather lots and lots of information. So I think it's kind of on the on the on, like, the regulatory front and like policy in

order to kind of put safeguards on a lot of this technology, because the technology kind of by itself can sort of just run wild. So we end every endless threat episode by saying that this podcast. podcast is about the blurred lines between the internet and real life for something silly. And clearly we're overdue for a really big reckoning about just how blurry these lines can get. And I think that's what Anfou and Kane successfully demonstrated. What information about us on the internet do we want to be made accessible when our real world face gets scanned? Everyone I talked to for this episode, Koshif, Kane, Anfu, everyone agreed that we need to be having these conversations.

And government and tech companies need to pay attention to our answers. I agree with this too. I imagine this almost like an online dating platform, you know, like a guy who has never had one is imagining this, admittedly. But like that's an example of how you control how you're presented to the world, right? So a meaningful, standardized, or regulated version of that could be nice. It's like the awkward social work event where everyone wears name tags and you're like, Hello, Frederick, I'm Ben. I like long walks on the beach. That doesn't seem like so bad, but all accessible information about me scraped off the internet and thrown up in a hands-free display,

and I don't know that's happening. That seems bad. Yeah, and there's no undoing it, you know. So what would motivate a tech company to put certain genies back into certain bottles when it comes to information that's already out there and is being distributed and, you know, being shared with we don't know. So it's good for us to be more aware of what's available. But I guess we have to think about how to turn that back on the tech companies that are doing the sharing of the information. And I don't know how to do that. Me neither. But I don't think anyone wants this.

No one, even people we work for the tech companies. I don't think anyone wants to live in a world where someone can look at you and instantly pull up a picture from like your middle school track meet. Even Kashv, he seemed so chill about his face being connected to his journalism, but he actually has made a pretty conscious effort to keep that part of his identity separate from other parts of his life. Huh. Yeah. When I tried to find his reporting about India, I couldn't find it anywhere. And that's because Kashiv publishes his work under a slightly different name. I don't want my work people to know about majorism, so I kind of separated it out.

Well, well, well. Kashiv is a trickster after all. But I totally get it, right? Like we're always curating different parts of ourselves for different audiences. Like, Ben, you mentioned dating apps. And I guess if we all had some sort of standardized profile that came up when someone looked at us, Like, I'm fine with that conceptually, but I definitely do not want someone to, like, be able to look at me on the subway and be able to access random pieces of information I put online for specific audiences. Like, my actual old dating profiles, those are not for public consumption.

That would be alarming. Worse than the middle school track meet shot? I don't know. Okay, y'all. So if we did live in a world where a profile that everyone could see just by looking at us with eye x-ray glasses came up, what would you be comfortable having on the profile? Then Brock Johnson 2436 24. Talk to me about tacos. I thought you were like giving your Social Security number. Given my measurements. Those are my measurements.

2436-24. That means nothing to me. Truly nothing. I do not understand how man measurements work. I don't know. I guess I'd want, like, my most daring feet. You could know my most daring feet. Which, what even is that?

I went skydiving once. And that I love a vegetable. That makes me sound really boring. The skydiving is cool. A rabbit. Ask me about my rabbit. there you go I was thinking even more boring

I'd be okay with like my hometown on there like if you want to come talk to me about Winston-Salem I'm so happy very southern of you Grace very southern girl of you um and anything that's like not going to become

controversial I don't want anyone to like see something about me and want to spit in my face I don't think like Koshav I do not actually think I would want people to look at me and like know where I work even though that is probably the information that is most linked with my face at this point. I guess it might be fun to know the greatest trip someone's been on.

I'll go with that. Tell me about your greatest trip. So something that you wouldn't be able to find out online, but would be a great conversation starter. That's it. I want a conversation starter so that you can find out more and more from there. And I feel like I've been to a conference or something where there was something like this, where you had a QR code on your badge and people could just scan your badge and know specific information about you. But not in a creepy way.

I feel like we're talking ourselves into creating a planetary conference, which is like the worst boring dystopia outcome of all time when you really think about it. It's true because we should be going up to people and saying, Hello. What's up? You like soup too? I don't know why I landed on soup. Or if it looks like the person wants to be left the hell alone. Just leave them the hell alone. Yes.

Yes. We introduce yourself and be kind or just, you know, if they look grumpy, steer clear. Words to live by. Whatever you're wearing on your face. This episode was produced by. Grace Tatter, who was wearing Raybans at the time. It was co-hosted by myself, Emery Sievertsin, and Grace Tatter,

who was wearing Raybans at the time. It was mixed in sound designed by our production manager, Paul Vikis. Who doesn't need Raybans to look cool? Our managing producer is Samata Joshi. The rest of our team is Dean Russell and Emily Jenkowski. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities

and the train to Ashmont, which will be here in about 20 more minutes. If you've got an unsubridden. solve mystery and untold history or a crazy story from the internet's or real life or both that you want us to tell. Hit us up. Endless thread at wbUR.org.