GoKawiilYou 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.”
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