Nearby Glasses app detects smart glasses by Bluetooth signals

An Android app called Nearby Glasses is trying to solve a new social problem with a blunt technical trick: it scans Bluetooth signals and alerts users when it thinks Meta or Snap smart glasses are nearby. The app’s developer, Yves Jeanrenaud, told TechCrunch he built it after reading reporting on how camera-equipped glasses have been used to film and harass people, and after Meta moved to make face recognition a default feature on its Ray-Ban line.

The app works by listening for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertising packets—short radio beacons devices broadcast to announce themselves. Those packets often include identifiers that can reveal the device’s manufacturer. Nearby Glasses flags signals associated with Meta and Snap hardware, and it lets users add their own identifiers to broaden detection. In practice, that turns the ambient radio layer into a kind of “who is carrying what” directory, and it shows why consumer surveillance devices tend to drag an ecosystem of counter-surveillance behind them.

The limits are obvious. Manufacturer identifiers are not model identifiers, so a Meta VR headset can trigger the same alert as smart glasses. False positives are therefore a feature, not a bug: the app is warning about a vendor, not a specific product. False negatives are the more important problem. BLE advertising can be disabled, rate-limited, or changed; identifiers can be randomized; and platform vendors can move more of the signal into encrypted or OS-mediated discovery flows. Any of those responses would reduce third-party visibility—at the cost of breaking accessory pairing workflows and some cross-device features.

There is also the spoofing problem. If the app keys on publicly known identifiers, a malicious user can broadcast the same identifiers from a phone or cheap microcontroller and trigger alerts at will. That makes “smart-glasses detection” vulnerable to the same dynamics as spam filtering: once a rule becomes popular, adversaries learn to game it. The likely endpoint is not a stable technical standard but a rolling cat-and-mouse game between platform firmware updates and hobbyist tooling.

What makes the app notable is less the implementation than the direction of travel. When cameras become ordinary accessories, social consent becomes a moving target, and people who want to avoid being recorded start carrying sensors to reintroduce friction. The cost of always-on capture is pushed onto bystanders: they must either accept the risk, confront strangers, or instrument themselves.

Nearby Glasses currently exists only on Android, and Jeanrenaud told TechCrunch an iPhone version would depend on time and availability. The app’s core requirement—continuous background BLE scanning—also runs into the practical reality of battery drain and OS restrictions.

Jeanrenaud called the project a “desperate act of resistance.” For now, the resistance is a phone in a pocket, listening to the same radio chatter the glasses need in order to work.