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Early Movie Screenings Are Becoming Physical Gauntlets
Always watching // GIF by Kate Walker
A new app called ZuckOff can alert users when someone nearby is wearing smart glasses.
Why It Hits: Smart glasses are quickly gaining a controversial reputation as people use them for all the wrong reasons — stalking women, wearing them during first dates, and pirating movies. It’s no wonder many people feel like they’re an invasion of privacy and are looking for ways to avoid them.
Behind The Lens: Wired reports that ZuckOff is the brainchild of 30-year-old Polish developer Pawel Szydlowski and already has thousands of downloads.
ZuckOff was trained to detect the unique Bluetooth identifiers of various smart glasses models, like Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, and Snap Specs, that are nearby.
The app can’t tell when people are actually recording — it can only alert users that the glasses are turned on.
While the app’s flagship functionality is free, the Pro version (available for a one-time fee of $25) has features like “history logging, the ability to export the data as a CSV file, a homescreen widget, and continuous background monitoring that can scan for glasses and send alerts even with the screen off.”
Last Look: Smart glasses antagonism has reached a fever pitch because it’s so easy for people to physically disable the recording light. This has been especially problematic with Meta glasses, the market leaders in the category. Meta announced that it’s bricking people’s devices that tamper with the light… but the damage may already be done in the culture.
No one likes to feel spied on.
The Future: It wouldn’t be surprising if some events — like movie screenings, concerts, or other exclusive gatherings — start using ZuckOff to catch people illegally recording.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.