Privacy-conscious Saffas don’t yet have to contend with smart glasses getting all up in their business, but our time is coming. It may not be today or tomorrow, but the ubiquity of camera-laden smart glasses like Meta’s (and eventually Apple, Huawei, and OpenAI…) is inevitable. When that day comes, you’ll want a new app called ‘Nearby Glasses’ that’ll warn you when someone nearby is wearing a pair of the bloody things.
“I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech,” said the app’s developer, Yves Jeanrenaud, in a conversation with 404Media. “The app is free, open source, does not track you, and does not contain ads or other nuisances. May it be useful,” reads the app’s description on the Google Play Store.
Not so smart now, huh?
Smart glasses aren’t inherently bad. In fact, the tech embedded in the likes of Meta’s line of specs — which are generally considered to be the cutting-edge — has some rather cool features going for them. The in-lens display, for example, enables things like live translation, AI queries on the go, and hands-free calling.
The bit that concerns folks most is the 12MP shooter, which not only makes secretly recording folks out in public possible, but relatively easy. Hopefully less so if you’ve got Nearby Glasses installed on your device. By the time Meta’s ready to add facial recognition to its smart glasses (that’s a real plan, by the way), the app will be a must.
It’s currently available on the Google Play Store and GitHub (sorry, iPhone users), and uses a smart glasses’ distinctive Bluetooth signals against them. When the app detects such a signal in the nearby area (about a Bluetooth’s width away), it sends a push notification to its owner’s device to let them know there may be a pair lurking around. It’s up to the user to respond accordingly. In other words, get the hell out of there if you don’t want to maybe be recorded.
The app’s creator is aware that it may not be perfect. A proper lack of experience (his words), he says, may lead to a couple of false positives, such as the app detecting a nearby VR headset of the same manufacturer, for instance.
