ZuckOff App Detects Meta Smart Glasses via Bluetooth
Original: ZuckOff Is a Free App That Sees Meta Glasses Before They See You
Why This Matters
Consumer counter-surveillance tools emerging faster than platform policy or legislation signals a growing accountability gap.
Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski, 30, released ZuckOff, a free app that detects nearby Meta Ray-Ban and other smart glasses using Bluetooth fingerprinting. Since its August launch, the app has exceeded 5,000 downloads on the App Store and 1,000 on Google Play, amid growing public concern over covert filming.
ZuckOff works by scanning for Bluetooth signals broadcast by smart glasses and matching them against a library of manufacturer identifiers that Szydlowski compiled by purchasing various models and recording their signal fingerprints. It can flag Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, and Snap Spectacles in the vicinity, and uses signal strength to give rough proximity data. The app does not, however, reveal whether a device is actively recording or identify the wearer.
The backdrop is serious. Roughly 7 million pairs of Meta smart glasses were sold in 2025. A BBC investigation in January documented dozens of accounts posting footage of women filmed in public without consent, including one video that displayed a 21-year-old's face and phone number and racked up 1.3 million views. The glasses' LED recording indicators have been defeated by simple hardware hacks, enabling covert capture. Meta responded in July with a software update to detect physically tampered LEDs and disable those cameras, while CTO Andrew Bosworth insisted the product was designed to be noticed—a claim that sits uneasily with its core marketing pitch that the camera doesn't look like one.
Legislators are moving: California and several other jurisdictions have criminalized disabling recording lights or filming people without consent. ZuckOff occupies a legal gray area that works in its favor—since it only reads publicly broadcast Bluetooth signals, Meta has limited grounds to challenge it. A Pro tier at $25 adds history logging and CSV export.