Android app warns when it detects Meta glasses

Are you worried that someone wearing Meta's spy glasses might sneak up on you? Android users now have access to an app that can alert them if someone is wearing such smart glasses near them using Bluetooth.

Last week, Yves Jeanrenaud, an associate professor at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in Germany, released Nearby Glasses , an Android app that scans Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertising data for manufacturer identifiers associated with certain smart glasses, including Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.

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“This app notifies you when smart glasses are nearby,” Jeanrenaud writes in the project’s GitHub repository . “It uses company identifiers in the Bluetooth data sent by these devices.”

In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, he detailed how the software works.

“Bluetooth devices transmit small advertising packets,” he said. “While MAC addresses (which identify a specific device) and service UUIDs (which identify what they do) are randomized, the manufacturer identifiers in BLE advertising frames are mandatory and unchangeable.”

The application, he said, scans for manufacturer identifiers within the BLE ADV framework.

Would such an application be useful?

There have already been reported incidents of fights due to unwanted surveillance.

In December, a woman on the New York City subway reportedly broke the Meta AI glasses worn by “a TikToker.” The incident went viral, suggesting the persistence of widespread social discomfort with non-consensual audio/recording/videography that emerged more than a decade ago when Google released the first connected glasses, aka Google Glass . Of course, there’s also the possibility that the incident was staged, because that’s the world we live in.

However, there have been other worrying reports of so-called “male influencers” using smart glasses to secretly record their dates with women, which they then post on social media sites “to create misogynistic content online.”

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