ZuckOff is a free phone app for detecting certain nearby smart glasses, including Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, and Snap Spectacles. Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski reportedly built it after seeing videos filmed with smart glasses without subjects realizing they were being recorded.
The app is designed to detect certain nearby models, including Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, and Snap Spectacles.
The app listens for Bluetooth advertisements—the short signals devices broadcast so nearby phones can discover them. It compares several fields, including a universally unique identifier, or UUID, used to identify a Bluetooth service, with a manufacturer identifier. If both match a fingerprint Szydlowski recorded from known glasses, ZuckOff flags the device and uses signal strength to estimate whether it is near or farther away.
The detection method can flag known glasses nearby but cannot confirm recording or identify the wearer.
That mechanism answers one reader question: how can a phone notice glasses that look ordinary? It does not answer the more important one. ZuckOff cannot tell whether the glasses are recording, who is wearing them, or what they may do with footage. A detected pair might simply be idle, while an undetected model may remain invisible to the app.
The privacy concern comes from recording that can be hard to recognize. WIRED described a Paris researcher being filmed during a street conversation before being told, while Business Insider reported that Szydlowski was motivated by videos showing unsuspecting strangers and online posts that exposed them. These accounts illustrate why an inconspicuous camera can feel different from an obviously raised phone, but they do not establish how often abuse occurs.
The app therefore creates partial visibility, not protection. Its free iPhone version performs basic scanning; a paid Pro version adds background monitoring, notifications, widgets, sighting history, and CSV export. Reported download counts came from the app's launch period, not an independent audit. No supplied material tests detection accuracy across phone models, crowded Bluetooth environments, newer glasses, or deliberate changes to transmitted identifiers.