Pawel Szydlowski watched a string of videos and felt angry. In them, people wearing smart glasses pranked strangers or chatted up women with pickup lines, and the people on the receiving end plainly had no idea they were being filmed. “There was not even a blur involved to try to censor them, to give them some sort of feeling of privacy,” he told CNET.
So the 30-year-old Polish software developer built something. The app is called Zuckoff, and it tells you when a pair of smart glasses is somewhere near you.
How it spots the glasses
The trick is Bluetooth. Szydlowski bought several models of smart glasses himself and studied the signals each one broadcasts, building a digital fingerprint for them. The app compares what a phone picks up, including a device’s UUID and its manufacturer identifier, against that library. “If the unique identifier matches, and also if the manufacturer identifier matches, then we have like an ultimate combo there,” he told Business Insider.
Wired Middle East reports that it catches Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta and Snap Spectacles. Scanning gives a rough sense of distance. The basic version is free on iPhone, and a Pro tier adds background alerts, widgets and a sighting history. CNET puts that premium version at $10 a year.
It has limits, and the developer says so himself. Zuckoff cannot tell you whether the glasses are recording, or who is wearing them. It turns an invisible problem into a partly visible one, as Wired put it. Since the app listens only to signals the glasses openly broadcast, Wired also noted that it would be hard for Meta to take it down legally.
Why people downloaded it
Business Insider counted 5,000 users within a month of the App Store launch, and Wired Middle East reported the same figure. For schools, cinemas and families who simply do not want to turn up in a stranger’s video, the appeal is plain. Wired noted that some venues, schools and cinemas among them, are banning the glasses outright. Roughly seven million pairs were sold in 2025, the magazine said.
The LED that is supposed to warn bystanders has been a weak point. Wired said it is fairly easy to defeat with a bit of tape. Business Insider reported that Meta bricked thousands of pairs this month after finding the lights had been tampered with, while chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth said in an Instagram video that “we designed this camera to be noticed by the people around you.”
Szydlowski gave Meta some credit. “Thumbs up to Zuck,” he said of its recent privacy-control updates, though he thinks the company still has a way to go. His suggestion is the one Apple and Google followed for AirTags and similar trackers: an industry standard that lets phones warn their owners. Smart-glasses makers could do the same, he said, and “if they really care about that part not being abused, they would go that way.”
Regulators have noticed. Szydlowski told Business Insider that European Union officials contacted him for more information about the app. His own hope, he told CNET, is that Zuckoff becomes unnecessary once detection is built into phones and the glasses themselves, which would be “the perfect solution.”
Sources
- This developer created an app to detect nearby Meta glasses. It already has thousands of users. – Business Insider
- How to Tell If Someone Near You Is Wearing Meta Smart Glasses – WIRED Middle East
- Smart Glasses Detector Apps Are Here. How Well Do They Work? – CNET
