Camera glasses don't wait for permission to announce themselves. Every time a pair of Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, or Snap Spectacles is in Bluetooth range, it sends out a BLE advertisement packet with a manufacturer ID, a short number baked into the chip. If you know which IDs belong to which glasses, you can build an app that listens for those packets and tells you when camera-capable hardware is nearby. That is exactly what ZuckOff does. It is a free iOS and Android app by Pawel Szydlowski, a Polish developer who bought several pairs of camera glasses, captured their Bluetooth traffic, and built a matching catalog. The app has picked up around 5,000 users since landing in the App Store last month.
Szydlowski's reasoning is direct: "We as a society have the right to at least know that someone is recording." He doesn't claim the app can prove recording is happening. It can't. It turns an invisible nearby camera into something you can at least be aware of.
How detection actually works
BLE devices don't wait to be queried. Most continuously broadcast small advertisement packets, a few dozen bytes that announce their existence, approximate distance via signal strength, and often a manufacturer-specific data field identifying the chipset or company. ZuckOff reads that field. This is not a hack or exploit; the packets are public by design, like a Wi-Fi router broadcasting its SSID.
Szydlowski's catalog maps manufacturer data to real products:
0x0D53 -> Luxottica: Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta
0x058E -> Meta Platforms Technologies wearable
0x03C2 -> Snap: Spectacles
0xFD5F -> service UUID registered to Oculus VR
The app also flags plaintext product names like "Spectacles", "HeyCyan", or "VisionPro" at lower confidence, since name strings are easier to spoof or accidentally match than registered manufacturer IDs. Every rule, per the app's description, "comes from a capture of a real device." Szydlowski owns a few pairs and is asking owners of unlisted hardware to send him a short Bluetooth capture or loan him the glasses so the catalog can grow. It is a crowdsourced fingerprint database bootstrapped by one person buying hardware out of pocket.
The rest of the app is straightforward once detection exists. It shows the evidence behind every flag instead of a bare "camera nearby" warning, logs every Bluetooth device it hears whether or not it matches, lets you mark glasses you own so they stop raising alerts, and exports the whole log as CSV. On iPhone there is a Lock Screen Live Activity and Home Screen widget. On both platforms you can start and stop scans from Siri, Shortcuts, or an automation. No account is required, and the app's privacy claim is that nothing leaves the phone.
What it can't tell you
The app is upfront about its limits. Glasses broadcast loudest when powering on, pairing, or coming out of the case. Most pairs keep advertising continuously while worn, but the documentation notes that "a few standalone models stay silent." Quiet doesn't mean nobody is recording, and a detection doesn't mean anyone is either. It means camera-capable hardware is somewhere in Bluetooth range. Signal strength gives a rough distance, not a direction, so ZuckOff can tell you a pair is close without telling you where to look.
Third-party testing confirms the same picture: the app identifies hardware capable of recording, not an active recording session, and it can't identify who is wearing the glasses.
The LED that keeps getting patched around
Meta's own answer to this problem is a small white LED that lights up while the camera is recording. It has been trivial to defeat almost since launch. Engadget tested a $16.99 kit of a dozen stickers sold on Amazon and TikTok Shop: a notched clear layer over the sensor and a black sticker over the light itself, cheap enough per sticker that the headline rounded it down to "a $2 sticker." Worn outdoors on second-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses, the LED became undetectable and never tripped Meta's tamper warning. Hobbyists have also physically removed the LED for around $60, leaving the glasses looking stock.
Meta has been chasing the loophole in software. An earlier fix targeted the moment recording starts: if the LED was already covered, the camera would refuse to record. The gap was starting a recording first and covering the light after. An update rolling out on August 28, 2026 closes that too. Per Meta's VP of AR, "the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording." It's an incremental fix to a signal that keeps getting worked around. A detector that reads a hardware manufacturer ID rather than a light is a different kind of check. You can't sticker over a Bluetooth radio without breaking the reason the glasses have one.
Why this is landing now
Meta is not standing still. On September 15, 2026, the company launched Meta One, a bundle of paid tiers across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta AI starting at $2.99 a month and running up to $499 for business accounts. Two days from now, at Connect on September 23, Meta is expected to unveil Luna: glasses with no camera, replaced by six onboard microphones, a temple button for the AI assistant, and slimmer arms, shipping this fall in two versions codenamed Clubmaster and Burbank. TechCrunch's framing is pointed: Meta is building a pair "without integrated spy equipment," months after the current camera-equipped line drew accusations of enabling covert filming.
The money underneath is not subtle. Reality Labs lost about $4 billion in Q1 2026 and another $4.6 billion in Q2, pushing cumulative losses since the division's creation to roughly $88 billion. Camera-equipped glasses have been one bright spot in sales, and also the source of a growing privacy backlash: venues from cinemas to schools to pubs in the UK have started banning them outright. Meta building a camera-free variant and layering subscription revenue in the same month reads less like coincidence and more like hedging against the exact criticism an app like ZuckOff exists to make visible.
A small coincidence in the name
The app's name is a jab at Mark Zuckerberg, but it also happens to be the surname of an unrelated real person: Mitchell Zuckoff, a journalism professor who found out about the app through news coverage. He decided not to pursue it, saying he had more pressing things to focus on, including work related to child surveillance protection. A footnote, but a good one.
Detection as a category, not a one-off
ZuckOff isn't the only tool doing this. Similar Bluetooth-based detectors exist for Android, and the pattern is bigger than any single app. As camera-equipped wearables ship by the million with no built-in way for bystanders to opt out, independent developers are quietly building the accountability layer the manufacturers didn't. None of it needs venture funding. The stack is a phone's Bluetooth radio, a catalog of manufacturer IDs built by buying hardware and capturing packets, and a UI that shows its work. The free tier does the actual detection; a $9.99-a-year or $24.99-lifetime Pro tier funds background alerts and, per the developer, the next pair of glasses worth capturing. That's a strange but honest business model: the privacy tool doesn't monetize your data, because there isn't any to sell. It monetizes convenience, and it grows exactly as fast as one person can afford new hardware to reverse-engineer.
Top comments (0)