A new app called Nearby Glasses uses Bluetooth and other signals to detect when someone in your vicinity is wearing smart glasses with recording capabilities. It's a privacy arms race: as Meta, Ray-Ban, and others push camera-equipped eyewear, people are building counter-surveillance tools to protect themselves.
We're normalizing cameras everywhere, and the backlash is coming from the bottom up. This app won't stop the march of ambient computing, but it's a reminder that not everyone signed up to be recorded constantly in public.
How It Works
According to TechSpot, Nearby Glasses scans for the Bluetooth signatures of popular smart glasses models—Meta Ray-Ban, Google Glass, various AR headsets—and alerts you when they're detected nearby.
The app can't tell if the glasses are actively recording. It just tells you they're capable of recording, which is arguably the relevant fact. Once you know someone's wearing camera-equipped glasses, you can decide how to respond: leave the area, adjust your behavior, or confront them.
It's not perfect detection—Bluetooth can be spoofed or disabled—but it's better than nothing.
Why This Exists
Smart glasses manufacturers keep promising that camera-equipped eyewear will be normalized. Mark Zuckerberg wants Ray-Ban Meta glasses to be fashion accessories that happen to record video. Apple is reportedly working on AR glasses with always-on sensors.
The pitch is always the same: Don't worry, we've designed them responsibly. There's an LED indicator when recording. People will get used to it.
Except people aren't getting used to it. They're building counter-surveillance apps.
This is the predictable cycle: technology enables new surveillance capability → companies normalize it → users push back → someone builds tools to resist.
We saw it with Google Glass in 2013, when bars started banning "Glassholes." We're seeing it again with Meta's glasses, except now the hardware is more subtle and harder to spot.
The Privacy Asymmetry
Here's the fundamental problem: consent is asymmetric.
When you wear smart glasses in public, you're making a choice about your own privacy. But you're also making a choice about everyone else's privacy—without asking them.
That LED indicator? Great in theory. In practice, most people won't notice a tiny light on someone's glasses frames. And even if they do, what recourse do they have? Ask politely? Get confrontational? Leave?
Nearby Glasses at least gives you information. It won't stop recording, but it lets you know you're potentially being recorded—which is more than the glasses themselves guarantee.
What Comes Next
This is just the beginning of the privacy arms race. As smart glasses become more common:
• Detection apps will get better, using ML to identify glasses by visual signatures, not just Bluetooth. • Glasses manufacturers will make detection harder—disabling discoverable Bluetooth, using encrypted protocols. • Public spaces will start posting policies: glasses allowed/banned/recording indicators required. • Legal frameworks will slowly catch up, creating patchwork regulations around consent and recording.
We're in the messy middle period where the technology exists, adoption is growing, but social norms haven't solidified.
My Take
Having worked in tech, I understand the enthusiasm for ambient computing. Smart glasses are cool. The hands-free utility is real. AR overlays will be genuinely useful.
But we're deploying these technologies without solving the consent problem. "Everyone will get used to being recorded" isn't a privacy policy—it's wishful thinking.
Nearby Glasses is a band-aid on a structural problem. But until manufacturers and regulators take privacy seriously, band-aids are what we've got.
The technology is impressive. The question is whether we're ready for a world where everyone might be recording everyone, all the time.
Judging by the existence of this app, a lot of people aren't.
