ZuckOff Is a Free App That Sees Meta Glasses Before They See You

A free app called ZuckOff scans for the Bluetooth signals that smart glasses give off, alerting users when a pair of Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta or Snap Spectacles is nearby. It was built by Pawel Szydlowski, a 30-year-old developer from Poland, as a countermeasure to filming without consent.

How the detector works

Szydlowski recorded the Bluetooth signals broadcast by various models of smart glasses and built a digital fingerprint for each of them. He bought the hardware himself to compile the data. The app raises a flag when a unique identifier matches a manufacturer identifier, catching models such as Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta and Snap Spectacles in the vicinity.

Downloads and legal footing

In its launch month, ZuckOff was reportedly downloaded more than 5,000 times on Apple's App Store, while Google Play showed 1,000 downloads at the time of writing. Taking the app down would be legally difficult for Meta: it does not intercept anything, and the signals it reads are legal to receive. Basic scanning is free on iPhone, while a paid ZuckOff Pro version adds continuous background monitoring, widgets, alerts, sighting history and CSV export.

Why smart glasses are under scrutiny

Meta's smart glasses have faced heavy scrutiny in recent months, and unsolicited filming has become a growing public safety concern, with venues such as schools and cinemas increasingly banning them outright. A BBC investigation in January traced dozens of accounts posting footage filmed with Meta glasses; one of them published a 21-year-old woman's face and phone number, collecting more than 1.3 million views.

The recording indicator light on the glasses has proved fairly easy to defeat with a bit of tape, allowing more wearers to record unnoticed. Roughly seven million pairs of Meta's smart glasses were sold in 2025. In July, Meta said it would push an update to detect when an LED light has been “physically tampered with or destroyed” and stop filming on those cameras. In an Instagram video, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said the camera was designed to be noticed by the people around you.

ZuckOff still cannot tell whether a nearby pair of glasses is recording, or who is wearing it. It reads signal strength to give rough proximity information, turning an invisible problem into a partially visible one.