Imagine walking into a coffee shop and scanning the room not for an empty seat, but for a pair of glasses. Not because you’re worried about the sun, but because somewhere in the dim light a tiny camera might be hidden behind a seemingly ordinary pair of frames. This is the uncomfortable reality of a world where Meta’s smart glasses, and others like them, have become popular enough to blur the line between everyday wear and discreet surveillance. The fear of being filmed without consent has moved from paranoid fantasy to a concrete concern, and into that space has stepped a small, scrappy app called ZuckOff. Built by Pawel Szydlowski, a 30-year-old Polish developer, ZuckOff is a free mobile application that uses Bluetooth detection to alert you when a known pair of smart glasses is nearby. It isn’t a camera detector, exactly, and it can’t tell you whether someone is recording you. But it can tell you that a pair of Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, or Snap Spectacles glasses is within Bluetooth range, which is often enough to change how you behave in a room. Since launching in August, the app has reportedly been downloaded more than 5,000 times on Apple’s App Store and around 1,000 times on Google Play. Those numbers are small by mainstream standards, but they represent a real and uneasy demand: ordinary people want a way to see what their eyes cannot.
Szydlowski’s approach is deceptively simple, and it rests on the fact that smart glasses are not silent hardware. They constantly broadcast Bluetooth signals in order to pair with phones, transfer media, and communicate with apps, and each pair leaves a kind of electronic fingerprint in the air. Szydlowski recorded the Bluetooth signals emitted by various models of smart glasses and built a database of identifiers that can be matched against what an ordinary phone detects while scanning. When a unique identifier matches up with a known manufacturer identifier, ZuckOff raises a flag. It can catch the Ray-Ban Meta frames that are designed to look like regular sunglasses, the Oakley Meta models aimed at athletes, and even the camera-equipped Snap Spectacles that once seemed like a novelty but now feel more ominous. The app reads the strength of the Bluetooth signal to give a rough sense of proximity, meaning you might know that a pair of glasses is in the same café, though you won’t know exactly who is wearing them or whether they are actively filming. This makes ZuckOff a partial solution, but that partial visibility is precisely its value. It takes a form of surveillance that is usually invisible and turns it into something you can sense, something you can react to. In a way, it is like learning to recognize the hum of a refrigerator in a quiet kitchen: once you know the sound is there, you can never quite ignore it again.
The reason an app like ZuckOff exists at all is that smart glasses have generated a rising tide of public unease. Over the past few months, Meta’s glasses have drawn heavy scrutiny because unsolicited filming has become a growing safety concern in public spaces, schools, gyms, and even on dates. There are now well-documented stories of people wearing the glasses specifically to film romantic encounters without the other person’s knowledge, and venues ranging from cinemas to swimming pools have decided to ban the devices outright. The anxiety is not theoretical. In January, a BBC investigation traced dozens of accounts that posted footage of women who had been filmed in public with Meta glasses and then shared online without their consent. One particularly disturbing example involved a 21-year-old woman whose face and phone number were posted alongside an invasive video, and that post went on to amass more than 1.3 million views. What makes these stories even harder to stomach is that the recording indicator lights on the glasses, the tiny LEDs meant to signal that filming is happening, can be defeated with relatively simple hardware modifications. A person with a little technical skill can cover the light, disable it, or physically remove it, and suddenly the glasses become something closer to a hidden camera. Given that roughly 7 million pairs of Meta’s smart glasses were sold in 2025, the number of potential camera-wearers in the world is no longer trivial. The danger is widespread, and the responsibility for staying safe seems to be falling on the people who are potentially being filmed.
Meta, for its part, has tried to respond to the backlash, though its response has been complicated by the very nature of the product. In July, the company announced it would push an update designed to detect when the LED indicator has been “physically tampered with or destroyed,” and to prevent people from using the cameras in that condition. In an Instagram video, Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, insisted that the company designed the camera to be noticed by the people around you. On the surface, that sounds responsible, but it sits awkwardly against the fact that one of the main selling points of the glasses is that the camera does not look like a camera. The frames are stylish, discreet, and designed to resemble ordinary eyewear, which is precisely why people feel uneasy. You cannot tell by looking at someone whether they are simply shielding their eyes or capturing your image. Meta appears to want it both ways: to sell a product that is seamlessly integrated into daily life and also to assure the public that those around them should feel safe. But those two ambitions are in tension. If the camera is truly meant to be noticed, then why make it look like an everyday accessory? This contradiction is at the heart of the growing distrust, and it explains why a simple scanner app has found an eager audience. People are not waiting for a corporate promise of transparency; they are building their own tools of awareness.
That said, ZuckOff is not a miracle cure, and Szydlowski does not pretend it is. The app cannot tell you whether a pair of glasses nearby is actively recording, nor can it identify who is wearing them. It can only tell you that certain glasses are in your vicinity, with a rough estimate of distance based on signal strength. That is a modest piece of information, but it is exactly the kind of information that can turn an invisible problem into a visible one. It gives a person a chance to choose to move away, to cover their face, to confront someone, or simply to be more mindful of what they say and do. And until legislators catch up with technology, that small awareness may be all we have. Some places are beginning to act: California and a few other jurisdictions have taken steps to make it a crime to disable the recording light on such a device or to record people without their consent. But legal change is slow, while product cycles are fast. In the meantime, apps like ZuckOff offer a stopgap, a way to navigate a world where the rules are still being written. The app’s basic scanning feature is free, but there is also a paid ZuckOff Pro version, priced at $25, which adds history logging, the ability to export data as a CSV file, a homescreen widget, and continuous background monitoring that can scan for glasses and send alerts even when the screen is off. The existence of those paid features shows that this is not just a joke app or a novelty. There are people who genuinely want this protection as a daily layer of awareness, and they are willing to invest in it.
Ultimately, the story of ZuckOff is not really about Bluetooth signals or sunglasses. It is about the erosion of trust and the slow, awkward process of figuring out how to live with a new kind of technology. Smart glasses are not going away, and they may become even more common in the coming years. The question is how we, as a society, will adjust to living in a world where recording is always possible and where consent is no longer visible. The answer will have to come from a combination of laws, corporate accountability, and social norms, but those things take time. Apps like ZuckOff represent a raw, human response to that gap: the instinct to defend ourselves with the tools we have right now. It doesn’t solve the problem, and it doesn’t force Meta to change its design. But it does something quietly powerful. It reminds us that we are not completely powerless, that our unease is justified, and that the burden of safety should not rest entirely on the shoulders of the people who might be filmed. It makes the invisible world a little more visible, one Bluetooth signal at a time. This story originally appeared in WIRED Middle East, and it captures a moment when privacy, technology, and ordinary life are colliding in ways we are only beginning to understand.
