# Four apps now exist to catch smart glasses recording you

Source: https://idevice.com/four-apps-now-exist-to-catch-smart-glasses-recording-you
Published: 2026-09-04

> Scanner apps listen for the Bluetooth a powered-on pair gives off, which means they work on every wearer except the one who disabled the light.

People are now buying software to find out whether the glasses across the room are filming them. Four such apps sit on the App Store, and Tom's Guide found them there this week: Antizuck Smart Glasses Scanner, Nearby Glasses, Zuckoff and NoGlasshole. Nearby Glasses runs on Android too. None of them costs much, and the hardware alternative people are pairing with them runs about thirty dollars.

The market they are answering to is growing quickly. IDC put smart glasses shipments at roughly 2.25 million units in the first quarter of 2026, a rise of 167 percent over the same quarter a year earlier. [Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2](https://idevice.com/smart-glasses/meta-ray-ban/roadmap/gen-2) and the Meta Oakley HSTN are the volume, with Rokid and a long tail of smaller makers behind them. That is a lot of cameras arriving on a lot of faces in a short time.

What the apps actually do is narrow. They listen for the Bluetooth signal a pair of glasses gives off once it is powered on, and they raise an alert when something capable of recording is nearby. They can't tell you the camera is rolling. They can't tell you who is wearing it. They tell you that a device of that kind is within range, which is a different and much smaller piece of information than the fear that prompted the download.

The fear has specifics behind it. Ars Technica reported cases of the glasses being used to film people in bathrooms and changing rooms. Futurism reported boys in American middle and high schools using them to harass girls. Meta has been reworking its privacy settings against a nickname the product picked up on its own, and Hamburg's parliament voted last week to keep the glasses off the city's trams and out of its public pools.

Detection works because the glasses announce themselves, and the people worth detecting are the ones who have stopped the announcing.

Bluetooth is one of three giveaways. Wi-Fi is another. The LED on the front of the frame lights when the camera runs, and the manufacturers built it for exactly this purpose. Modders are already disabling that light. A scanner app cannot see a hardware indicator that has been switched off, and a wearer determined enough to open the frame is the wearer these apps were downloaded to catch.

So the tools are less a solution than a reading of where the category stands. The first generation of smart glasses lost on the technology. This generation works, sells in the millions, and is running into a wall built entirely out of other people's comfort. Every maker shipping a camera on a face now has two problems: convince the buyer, and convince the stranger. Only one of those is solved by a better product.

The detection apps won't stay useful for long. They depend on a wireless signature the industry has every commercial reason to make quieter, and on an indicator light a soldering iron removes in an afternoon. What they record is that a few thousand people wanted the check badly enough to go looking for one, six months into the first year anybody sold these in volume.