ZuckOff detects nearby Meta and Snap camera glasses by their Bluetooth signatures

A Bluetooth detector for camera glasses

ZuckOff, a free app built by 30-year-old Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski, scans for the Bluetooth signals that camera glasses emit and alerts users when a pair is nearby. According to Wired, the app was downloaded more than 5,000 times on Apple's App Store in its launch month, with a further 1,000 downloads on the Google Play Store at the time of writing.

The app targets a specific anxiety. Smart eyewear such as Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta and Snap Spectacles ships in large volumes, with roughly seven million pairs of Meta's glasses sold in 2025, Wired reports. The recording indicator lights on those devices have proven easy to defeat with a bit of tape, letting wearers film without being detected.

How the matching works

Wired reports that Szydlowski bought the hardware himself and recorded the Bluetooth signals each model broadcasts, building a digital fingerprint per device. The app then flags when a unique identifier lines up with a manufacturer identifier.

The project's official site documents the specific signatures it watches for: 0x0D53 for Luxottica hardware including Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta, 0x058E for a Meta Platforms Technologies wearable, 0x03C2 for Snap's Spectacles, and 0xFD5F, a service UUID registered to Oculus VR. Product names such as Spectacles, HeyCyan, VisionPro and VistaView are matched at lower confidence.

The site emphasises privacy: nothing leaves the phone and there is no account. Every flag is accompanied by the evidence behind it so users can disagree with the verdict, the app logs every Bluetooth device it hears, and owners of a pair can mark them once so they stop raising alerts. Scans can be started and stopped from Shortcuts, Siri or an automation, and on iPhone the app offers background alerts, a Home Screen widget and a Lock Screen Live Activity.

The backlash it taps into

Meta's glasses have drawn months of scrutiny, with schools and cinemas among the venues banning them outright, according to Wired. A BBC investigation in January traced dozens of accounts posting content filmed with the glasses; one posted a 21-year-old woman's face and phone number, amassing over 1.3 million views.

In July, Meta said it would push an update that detects when the LED has been physically tampered with or destroyed and stops the wearer from filming, Wired reports. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has said the camera was designed to be noticed by the people around the wearer, a claim in tension with a product whose key selling point is that the camera does not look like a camera.

What it cannot tell you

ZuckOff cannot determine whether a nearby pair is recording, nor identify who is wearing it. Signal strength gives a rough distance but no direction. The official site adds that glasses are loudest when they power on, pair or leave their case; most pairs keep advertising while worn, but some standalone models stay silent. Quiet is not proof that nobody is recording, and a detection is not proof that anyone is.

Wired also argues the app would be difficult for Meta to challenge legally, since it intercepts nothing and the signals it reads are legally broadcast.

How it is funded

Basic scanning is free on iPhone, while a paid ZuckOff Pro tier adds continuous background monitoring, widgets, alerts, sighting history and CSV export, according to Wired. The project also sells printed-on-demand merchandise and accepts donations, which fund the purchase of additional hardware for testing. Owners of camera glasses the app does not yet list can submit a short scan capture, or lend hardware that is returned after it is recorded, and the developers say they are open to working with privacy groups.

Why it matters

ZuckOff takes a risk that is invisible to bystanders and makes it partially observable. It cannot close the gap between knowing a camera is present and knowing it is in use, and it is honest about that limit, but it hands people near-real-time awareness that no venue ban or LED indicator reliably provides. Because it reads only legally broadcast signals and intercepts nothing, it sits in a spot that is awkward for hardware makers to attack directly. As camera-equipped eyewear becomes ordinary streetwear, expect this to be the shape of the standoff: detection tools built from crowdsourced signal captures on one side, tamper-resistant indicators on the other, and legislators yet to weigh in.