If You Don’t Want Smart Glasses to Spy, Try a Bluetooth Detector App

You can no longer assume a pair of black-rimmed glasses is just prescription eyewear.

As Meta AI smart glasses grow in popularity and other wearables join the race, they’re facing mounting public backlash over their hidden surveillance capabilities. Smart glasses can record, stream and process video without alerting anyone around them — unless you consider a tiny recording indicator light sufficient.

Broad concerns over privacy have led to a technical battle. On one side, hardware modifiers are tweaking wearable cameras to make them even harder to spot, often by disabling LED indicators. On the other, developers and privacy-focused coders are launching counter tech to give you a heads-up when a hidden camera walks into the room.

One of those developers has already gained traction with a free Apple iOS app called Zuckoff, a digital detection tool to spot nearby Ray-Ban Meta glasses, Snap Spectacles or similar hardware.

Zuckoff, whose name takes a direct jab at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has joined a small ecosystem of apps such as Antizuck Smart Glasses Scanner and Nearby Glasses that offer similar functionality — letting you know when someone has smart glasses activated and how close the device is, although they can’t tell you specifically whether someone is actively recording or using AI to pull up information. The apps detect approximate device proximity by sweeping local Bluetooth frequencies to locate vendor IDs, system identifiers and hardware signatures associated with smart glasses.

As Zuckoff’s website notes: “Glasses advertise loudest while powering on, pairing or leaving the case. Once paired to their owner’s phone, they can go quiet, so silence is not proof that nobody is recording, and a detection is not proof that anyone is. Signal strength gives a rough distance and no direction at all.”

Zuckoff’s developer, Pawel Szydlowski, said he was already working on projects that used Bluetooth to detect nearby devices and discovered the tech could be applied to smart glasses. “It’s just the same technology wrapped in a different paper,” he said in a video chat with CNET.

Sniffing out smart glasses

Recent reports have shown that smart glasses are being used for everything from bullying in schools to viral videos with unwitting subjects who don’t know they’re being recorded.

What drove Szydlowski to actively develop a software detector was seeing social media videos of people wearing smart glasses who recorded pranks or harassed women with pickup lines. None of the targets seemed aware that their content would appear online, which made Szydlowski angry. “There was not even a blur involved to try to censor them, to give them some sort of feeling of privacy,” he said. “These days, everybody feels entitled to post everything.”

App developer Pawel Szydlowski said he developed his app, Zuckoff, to help address people’s privacy concerns about smart glasses.Pawel Szydlowski

Since it launched in early August, the Zuckoff app has gotten 2,000 sign-ups, and Szydlowski is beta-testing an Android version he hopes to make available on the Google Play Store. The app also has a premium version for $10 a year that can run continuous detection checks in the background when the app isn’t in use.

But a booming ecosystem of DIY modifications and third-party hardware hacks is also giving smart glasses wearers unprecedented stealth by allowing them to disable the activation lights, either by bypassing the capture LEDs or by patching software to suppress system notifications.

Tech journalist Joanna Stern hosted a video showing the process in which a local hacker removed the LED light from her Ray-Ban Meta glasses for $100, allowing the wearables to secretly record without notice.

Smart glasses detected… now what?

Detecting active smart glasses in public or private spaces adds a new layer of security awareness, but it raises an obvious dilemma: What do you actually do with that information? Once a detector app alerts us that smart glasses are nearby, it seems our only choices are to either leave the space or ask the wearer to remove the glasses.

Uttara Ananthakrishnan, an assistant professor of Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University who studies the societal impacts of technology, says we’re still figuring out the social norms around wearables like smart glasses. It’s impossible to know whether the person filming will behave responsibly, and the question of consent gets even thornier if children might be captured on video or in photos.

Unlike with smartphones, where it’s easier to tell when someone is recording or taking photos, “smart glasses shift the burden of privacy entirely onto the person being photographed,” Ananthakrishnan said.

“Until we develop clear mechanisms to balance seamless innovation with consent, these devices will continue to turn everyday public spaces into zones of surveillance anxiety,” she said.

Privacy-conscious smart glasses?

That surveillance anxiety may prompt some hardware-makers to release alternative versions of smart glasses that entirely avoid potential privacy violations.

The Even G2 smart glasses don’t have a camera for recording photos or videos. They can pair with a separately sold R1 control ring that works as a fitness tracker.

Scott Stein/CNET

For instance, Even Realities’ G2 smart glasses don’t include a front-facing camera at all. Instead, the Even G2 devices, released in late 2025, focus on providing the wearer with information and acting more like a personal assistant.

“We made the decision from the beginning that smart glasses don’t need to have cameras on them in order to be useful,” Even Realities CEO Will Wang told CNET in an email. “We believe something worn on your face should respect not only the person wearing it, but everyone around them.”

The G2 devices don’t record externally, a design choice Wang said gave the company a unique challenge. “Leaving the camera out also pushed us to think differently about what actually makes smart glasses useful day to day, rather than assuming more sensors automatically make a better product,” he said.

Wang said there’s room in the smart glasses market for different approaches to features and functionality, and that buyers may want to make trade-offs for devices they’ll wear on their faces. But Wang noted that the rise of smart glasses detectors indicates that social acceptance is an issue the industry needs to consider.

The future of smart glasses detectors

Over the last several months, smart glasses have been getting cheaper. And with more models and companies jumping into the fray, the demand for surveillance detectors is likely to grow — that is, unless Big Tech and wearable companies radically change their devices to make them invisible to detector apps.

Zuckoff’s Szydlowski said it’s possible a company could shrink the kind of 5G technology to fit in smart glasses, making them less dependent on phones and Bluetooth, but that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. If Meta or Snap deliberately updated their hardware to hide from detection apps and disable smart glasses’ digital footprint, it would further undercut any claim of privacy accountability.

Szydlowski said his hope is that, in time, Zuckoff won’t be needed at all. He pointed out that the ability to detect nearby Apple AirTag devices eventually became part of the operating systems on iOS and Android devices. If consumers pressure manufacturers and their governments to make smart glasses easier to detect, it would be “the perfect solution” to make his app obsolete, he said.