A Boston man had a strange encounter at a subway station. A month later, he discovered he was the star of the students’ viral video.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Kashif Hoda was waiting for a train near Harvard Square when a young man asked him for directions. Mr. Hoda was struck by the man’s nerdy, thick-framed glasses, but he did not realize that they were Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and that a small white light indicated that they were recording.
A few minutes later, as Mr. Hoda’s train was pulling into the station, the bespectacled man, who was a junior at Harvard University named AnhPhu Nguyen, approached him again.
“Do you happen to be the person working on minority stuff for Muslims in India?” Mr. Nguyen asked.
Mr. Hoda was shocked. He worked in biotechnology, but had previously been a journalist and had written about marginalized communities in India.
“I’ve read your work before,” Mr. Nguyen said. “That’s super cool.”
They shook hands, but Mr. Hoda didn’t have time to continue the conversation because his train was boarding. He posted on social media, reflecting on how strange the encounter had been.
A month later, he found out just how strange. He had been an unwitting guinea pig in an experiment meant to show just how easy it was to rig artificial intelligence tools to identify someone, access the person’s biographical information — potentially including a phone number and home address — without the person realizing it.
A friend texted Mr. Hoda telling him he was in a video that was going viral. Mr. Nguyen and a fellow Harvard student, Caine Ardayfio, had built glasses used for identifying strangers in real time, and had demonstrated them on two “real people” at the subway station, including Mr. Hoda, whose name was incorrectly transcribed in the video captions as “Vishit.”