ZuckOff detects the camera outside your access model

Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta and Snap Spectacles broadcast a manufacturer signature over Bluetooth, the way Bluetooth devices advertise themselves to anything listening. ZuckOff, a phone app now at version 1.5.0, listens for those signatures passively and tells you when a pair of camera glasses is within range. There is no account, and nothing leaves the phone unless you file a report or switch on alerts from people nearby.

The detection is signature matching. Every rule in ZuckOff’s list comes from a capture of a real device, and the developer says they own only a few pairs. The app logs every Bluetooth device it hears, glasses or not, and shows the evidence behind each flag so you can disagree with it. Mark your own pair once and it stops raising alerts.

That makes ZuckOff a signature-based detector with the failure modes you would expect. The developer is blunt about them: quiet is not proof that nobody is recording, and a detection is not proof that anyone is. A pair that is off the list, or one that has gone quiet, passes without a flag, the same blind spot an IDS has against traffic it has no rule for. Signal strength gives a rough distance and no direction, so a flag tells you something is near, not where or who.

Version 1.5.0 works around the radio’s blind spot with people. Your eyes catch what Bluetooth misses: a pair not yet on the list, or one that has gone quiet. Tap report, and ZuckOff users within 500 m are warned for the next 30 minutes. A report of glasses you only saw is marked not verified, and the sheet lists every field before anything is sent. Reporting and alerts are free on iPhone, Mac and Android; Pro adds a map of the reports around you. The app also runs on Apple Watch, exports its whole log as CSV, and can start or stop a scan from Shortcuts, Siri or an automation.

For anyone responsible for a space where recording matters (a room with a whiteboard, screens, or conversations you would rather not have broadcast), camera glasses are a sensor your access model does not cover. Your badge readers, MDM and network ACLs see provisioned, authenticated devices. A pair of glasses on someone’s face is an unmanaged recording device that none of those controls register. ZuckOff is a detection layer for that gap. It can tell you a known pair is in the room; it cannot stop it recording, and it cannot see the models it has no capture for.

Treat it the way you would treat signature-based IDS in a sensitive environment: useful against known hardware, blind to everything else, and best paired with policy and physical controls rather than trusted on its own. The crowdsourced reports help with the long tail the signatures miss, at the cost of depending on strangers nearby running the same app.

If you have camera glasses the app does not list, the developer will take a short scan capture, or hardware on loan that they return once it is recorded, to add a rule. They say they are open to working with privacy groups. ZuckOff is independent and not affiliated with Meta, Luxottica, Ray-Ban, Oakley or Snap.