The free mobile app ZuckOff, built by 30-year-old Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski, uses a Bluetooth detection system to tell you whether there is a pair of smart glasses in the room with you.
Since its launch in August, the app has reportedly been downloaded by more than 5,000 people on Apple’s App Store. As of writing, it has been downloaded 1,000 times on the Google Play Store.
Meta’s smart glasses have endured a hefty share of scrutiny over the past few months. Unsolicited filming is a growing public safety concern, with people even wearing them to film their dates. Venues like schools and cinemas are increasingly banning their usage outright.
Szydlowski recorded the Bluetooth signals broadcast by various models of smart glasses, building a digital fingerprint for each of them. He bought the hardware to compile the data that flags when a unique identifier matches up with a manufacturer identifier, catching models like Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, and Snap Spectacles in the vicinity.
A BBC investigation in January traced dozens of accounts that posted content of women who were filmed in public by Meta glasses without their consent. One video posted a 21-year-old woman’s face and phone number and amassed over 1.3 million views.
The recording indicator lights on these glasses have proven fairly easy to defeat with simple hardware hacks, allowing a growing number of wearers to record without being detected. Roughly 7 million pairs of Meta’s smart glasses were sold in 2025.
In July, Meta announced that it would push an update to detect when an LED has been “physically tampered with or destroyed” and stop people from being able to film using those cameras. In an Instagram video, Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth stated that the company designed this camera to be noticed by the people around you. This is despite the fact that one of the product’s key commercial propositions is that the camera doesn’t look like a camera.
ZuckOff is not, however, able to tell you whether a pair of glasses nearby is recording, nor can it tell you who is wearing them. It reads signal strength to give you rough proximity information, which turns an invisible problem into a partially visible one, which at the very least is worth something until legislators take protective action; California and other territories have taken steps to make disabling the recording light or recording people without their consent a crime.
The app is also a pretty difficult thing for Meta to legally take down, since it isn’t interfering with the signals being sent by the glasses. Its basic scanning feature is free in the app, but there is also a ZuckOff Pro version available to purchase for $25. It adds features like history logging, the ability to export the data as a CSV file, a homescreen widget, and continuous background monitoring that can scan for glasses and send alerts even with the screen off.
This story originally appeared in WIRED Middle East.
