Can you tell when someone nearby is wearing Meta AI glasses?
As millions of people buy into the smart glasses fad each year, the odds are increasing that you could be secretly recorded while simply going about your day.
Meta is not the only smart glasses maker, but its AI glasses are by far the most popular. And as the devices become more common, some public places, including schools, courts, restaurants, and entertainment venues, have begun to ban them. Even tech lovers have rejected Meta glasses in certain settings. The hackers behind DEF CON 2026 reportedly banned smart glasses with no exceptions, reminding attendees with prescription pairs to “be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them.”
But a ban is only as effective as the people enforcing it. Spotting a pair of smart glasses can require tech-savvy security staff, and enforcement may depend on users voluntarily disclosing their devices—or on watchful observers speaking up.
Those bans are an important way to push back against the potential for abuse. But privacy advocates know that increasing the social friction around nonconsensual recording can’t stop the practice by itself.
Until comprehensive consumer privacy laws are passed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has warned that Meta seems prepared to make the tech even more invasive in its bid to sell more glasses and stay ahead of rivals in the burgeoning industry.
And as AI advances, EFF staff technologist Cooper Quintin told Ars, potential new features such as facial recognition could raise the stakes further, potentially allowing the devices to be used to create convincing deepfakes or nonconsensual intimate imagery of people who may not be aware that cameras are rolling.
“I think that there are a lot of other concerns there beyond just being recorded without your knowledge,” Quintin told Ars.
EFF has warned that smart glasses makers will likely be tempted to add facial-recognition features unless lawmakers intervene and give people a private right to sue companies whose products violate their biometric privacy rights. In the meantime, the group has released a guide for smart-glasses users that lays out ways to resist facial recognition, develop responsible recording habits, and better understand the privacy risks of continuous recording. It also urges users to consider blurring strangers’ faces before posting videos online.
For people unknowingly targeted in secret recordings, the only safety feature Meta provides is nearly “useless,” Quintin told Ars.
A tiny recording light that can be easily covered with a sticker is unlikely to deter bad actors intent on abusing the glasses, whether that’s stalkers or creepy partners secretly recording women in public bathrooms or private bedrooms. The tech has also controversially been used in immigration raids, 404 Media reported, and to harass sex workers and retail workers. And on social media, videos show a range of other unwanted recordings, from relatively inoffensive pranks to more harmful videos featuring bullying or harassment.
The volume of these videos online suggests the LED feature “is better than nothing, but not by much,” Quintin said.
Experts have noted that Meta may already have plans to diminish that limited safety feature. The company is supposedly “testing a prototype of ‘super sensing’ AI glasses that would use cameras and audio recordings to capture a wearer’s every moment,” the Financial Times reported last month. According to sources familiar with Meta’s thinking, executives “are planning not to activate the LED when the super-sensing features are being used,” even though “that would make it harder for bystanders to know when they were being recorded.”
Meta execs’ plans may change if the public’s privacy concerns remain a sticking point, though, sources have suggested. And backlash will likely be sustained as more people wear the glasses, since digital rights experts have accused Meta of failing to consider civil rights or privacy ramifications when designing new features. Perhaps most troublingly, Meta recently backpedaled and deleted an unreleased facial recognition system from its smart-glasses app that Wired and EFF revealed had been quietly installed on 50 million phones in June.
It’s unclear if or when Meta might try to bring the facial recognition system back. Meta did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on this story.
As Meta glasses have become more commonplace, hobbyist programmers have been building apps to detect when smart glasses are nearby so people can steer clear of them.
These civil defense apps, Quintin said, aren’t a perfect solution to the social problem of smart-glasses recording without consent. But when used in combination with bans, the apps can offer wary members of the public a way to check if a ban is being enforced or whether a nearby device may begin recording at a sensitive time. Society needs both solutions, Quintin said, especially because the most popular and recognizable smart glasses available today will likely one day come in a wider assortment of trendy models, making them harder to spot in the wild.
“You need to have the social construct around these being unwelcome, and you also need to be able to find when people are using these,” Quintin said. “Right now, they’re pretty easy to just detect with your eyes. They’re pretty obvious, but that might not always be the case. So technologies like this are also important to supplement that.”
Since February, engineers have been releasing and updating apps that help people detect glasses like Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, or Snap Spectacles.
“It is completely unsurprising that people are building apps to fight back against Meta glasses and other surreptitious public recording,” Quintin told Ars. Many people “have a deep revulsion to being recorded without their consent, which is understandable,” and that remains “the biggest problem with these glasses,” Quintin said.
Smart-glasses detector apps aren’t perfect. At best, they can alert users when nearby glasses are turned on by detecting the Bluetooth signal used to pair the glasses with a phone. Most importantly, the apps cannot determine whether the glasses are actively recording, and users are cautioned to never assume that someone wearing smart glasses is recording them. App makers also advise against confrontation and accept no liability for false positives or misunderstandings. Additionally, detection may be unreliable if a wall or other obstacle, like a human body, interferes with a signal.
Users don’t seem to consider these flaws deal-breakers. They simply want some way to scan a room, and some are eager to provide feedback to improve the apps, even expressing an emotional investment in seeing the technology develop.
One of the first apps, Nearby Glasses, is available for $2.99 on both iOS and Android. It has been downloaded more than 100,000 times from the Play Store and remains the most popular such app, despite the developer, Yves Jeanrenaud, warning on GitHub that he’s “no pro developer” and that “detecting Bluetooth LE devices might sometimes just not work as expected,” and “false positives are likely.”
Released in response to online content showing that smart glasses are “an intolerable intrusion, consent neglecting, horrible piece of tech,” Jeanrenaud said, he kept his goals humble. On GitHub, he wrote, “I hope this app is useful for someone,” but “I do not want to promote techsolutionism, nor do I want people to feel falsely secure. It’s still an imperfect approach,” and it probably “always will be.”
By July, another detector, Antizuck Smart Glasses Scanner, was nearing the top of iPhone charts, also charging $3 for the service. One high school teacher reviewing the app called it the “best $3 I’ve spent,” writing that she was concerned that her students could use AI glasses to take unwanted recordings in class.
Ars tested the most recently released app, Zuckoff, which launched for free on iPhone in early August and is currently seeking 12 testers to launch on Android devices later this year.
Already, thousands of users have downloaded the iPhone app, with some eagerly submitting feedback that has helped improve key functionality, including the ability to detect AI glasses and receive alerts when the app is closed. Perpetual scanning is an optional feature that costs about $10 a year. The subscription helps cover the costs of “continuous support” for the app, Zuckoff’s creator, Pawel Szydlowski, told Ars.
Like Jeanrenaud’s app, Zuckoff collects no data and was created partly in response to the toxic Meta glasses content that is flooding social media. Szydlowski told Ars that he built the app in one week after finishing another project that scans for nearby Bluetooth devices and deciding, “Let’s see how far we can go with detecting those glasses.”
