A $2.99 iPhone app launched last week has gone viral for doing something the smart glasses industry clearly didn’t anticipate: telling you when someone nearby is wearing them.
AntiZuck Smart Glasses Scanner, available for iPhone and designed by Albert Pariente Cohen, detects nearby Bluetooth signals that match Meta glasses, Snap Spectacles, Meta Quest headsets, RayNeo smart glasses, and other devices — then lets you know what gadget is nearby and whether it’s been detected previously.
The app takes a privacy-focused approach, performing all detection locally on the device without collecting user data, tracking locations, or accessing cameras and microphones. There is no account required, no subscription, and nothing leaves your phone.
How it works
AntiZuck listens for Bluetooth advertisements whose signatures match known smart glasses and tells you when it thinks a pair is nearby. Detections appear as blips on a live radar-like screen alongside rough proximity and a confidence rating. The app can also remember repeat sightings, send local notifications when closed, and let you mark your own glasses so they stop triggering alerts.
There are Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, a Control Center toggle, and support for assigning scanning controls to the iPhone’s Action Button.
The restraint in the design is notable. AntiZuck does not attempt to identify the person wearing the glasses, does not claim to know whether a device is recording, and does not report direction. It is honest about what it can and cannot do — an important distinction for an app operating at the edge of what Bluetooth detection can actually confirm.
The important limitation
Smart glasses mostly broadcast over Bluetooth at power-on, pairing, and case-open, so coverage is opportunistic. An alert means the app heard a Bluetooth broadcast that likely matches smart glasses — it cannot confirm recording, identify a person, or determine direction. Someone wearing Meta glasses that are already connected and in use may not trigger the app at all.
That limitation matters. AntiZuck cannot tell you whether you’re being filmed. It can tell you that a device capable of filming you may be nearby. For some people, that distinction will make the app feel inadequate. For others, any advance notice is better than none.
Why it exists
The app didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Meta sold more than seven million pairs of smart glasses last year, and the cultural mood around them has never been worse. Courts across the United States have begun banning smart glasses from their buildings — New York State banned them from all 1,240 of its courthouses on July 20. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have issued similar bans. A class-action lawsuit filed in California accuses Meta of routing footage from Ray-Ban glasses to overseas contractors for AI training without users’ knowledge.
AntiZuck is also not the first app of its kind. In February, hobbyist developer Yves Jeanrenaud released Nearby Glasses for Android, which uses Bluetooth Low Energy identifiers to spot compatible smart glasses and send alerts. The free, open-source app has since surpassed 100,000 downloads on Google Play. AntiZuck is the iPhone equivalent, arriving six months later into a market that has grown considerably more anxious about the technology in the interim.
What it tells the industry
The emergence of smart glasses detector apps is a signal that is worth taking seriously. When a $2.99 utility that tells people when camera-equipped glasses are nearby goes viral, it reflects something the hardware manufacturers have not yet resolved — a basic public discomfort with a technology that is increasingly present and largely invisible.
Apple’s response to that discomfort was to delay its own glasses by six months and prioritise privacy protections as “priority No. 1.” Samsung has not yet published a camera data policy ahead of its Galaxy Glasses launch this autumn. Meta has shipped a tamper-resistant LED but continues to face legal challenges over how footage is handled.
AntiZuck cannot solve any of those problems. But the fact that it exists, that it went viral, and that a similar Android app has crossed 100,000 downloads suggests the problem itself isn’t going away.