A new app alerts you if someone nearby is wearing smart glasses
A hobbyist developer’s new app, which can detect nearby smart glasses, comes amid resistance to always-on recording and listening devices that invade people’s privacy.
One of the chief problems with “luxury surveillance” devices, like smart glasses with baked-in video recording cameras, is that they often look indistinguishable from regular eyewear, meaning you might be recorded without knowing it.
But now there is an app that can detect and alert you when someone nearby is wearing smart glasses, or potentially other always-recording tech.
The Android app, aptly named Nearby Glasses, constantly scans for nearby signals that emit from Bluetooth-enabled tech, such as wearable devices made by Meta (and Oakley) and Snap.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
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