ZuckOff is a free app that sees Meta glasses before they see you

We are going to have the organic label soon on apps with this mindset..AI assisted development is evolving by the day and at the rate most apps will be built that way..

Why would I want a bluetooth scanner to phone home? Seems untrustworthy. Nearby Glasses wins from a data safety perspective.

and so I leave this comment as off topic, but, is it pretty easy to get your new app to appear in that ad slot, above the main contender?

"ZuckOff" is a better quality marketing name for an app like this, vibecoded or not.

The media and already consumers have talked more about "ZuckOff" than "Nearby Glasses" so a winner has already been chosen.

BTW, I will also recommend 'a hero of our time' by Lermontov. In it, you will get an updated view of what the meaning of 'friends' will be. :)

EDIT: since this is getting upvotes, I will also mention that Lermontov is a descendant of the Learmonts, who were British folk.

Also, the book is small but it's jampacked with a lot of wisdom--street and abstract both-- and presented using a language that shines with poetry, it shines even through translation (Penguin Classics trans. is best).

This comment box is too small to contain the story.

* The Quantum Thief

* The Fractal Prince

* The Causal Angel

Actually, most of the story is on his WikiPedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannu_Rajaniemi

As digital dystopias go, this is one of the worst I've seen; the episode ending with this happening to the protagonist shook me to the core.

> Nothing leaves your phone and there is no account.

This is good to know, but it's the exact type of thing Claude is obsessed with putting everywhere once you tell it NOT to do something. For example, if I tell it to commit but never push changes to GitHub, it can't help but leave "Changes committed; nothing was pushed." to EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE. The model just can't help but report back about everything it's NOT doing, and it drives me crazy.

There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).

Rendering security cameras useless for identifying any criminals?

Maybe some of these commenters aren’t old enough to remember when fighting for your right to take photographs and videos in public places was one of the frequent topics in online places like Slashdot and BoingBoing. There have been waves of attempts to restrict freedoms to take photos in many countries. When they pass there’s a significant loss of personal rights and freedoms.

> Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.

Do you really want this? An off-button for all cameras nearby? Please purchase your official photographs from the gift shop or from the $5 Photo Booth.

This would be a dream for bad people who don’t want to be recorded or photographed doing something, like a bad police officer. Just keep a device around that broadcasts the “do not record at this venue” signal and you can shut down recordings all around.

that requires too much goodwill and effort from the makers of such devices. They know their audience wouldn't want that. They don't give a shit about what people being filmed think.

Yes, let's keep coming with more of these great ideas.

To cut this short: the whole overall idea is just universal DRM writ large. A big, principled no fucking way, ever from me.

But what about the personal privacy / venue rights ...

That's a social problem, it should not be used as excuse to give unilateral control over other people's technology to groups or individuals with special interests.

It would make sure no websites track you.

The idea was for concert venues display these on-stage to block smartphones from filming (and redirect users to iTunes purchases instead IIRC)

Sounds like a swift way to be included in "Need constant observation" list. Or we can even build a special surveillance for such folks along with plausible Parallel construction scenario constantly refreshed.

Sounds a lot worse. The possible applications of this alone are infinitely more scary than perverts filming others without their consent.

This is THE nightmare scenario. Think about it for a second and you’ll see why.

We want a society that does not need these workarounds.

I never knew why the paparazzi could harass celebrities and a few decades later we are all being secretly filmed for a Meta perv database.

Incrementally, apathetically and often to gleeful offerings of tinfoil hats to those who pointed out previous steps and extrapolated them forth.

> Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.

> (…) The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. (…) Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re... or https://archive.is/65Fze

Despite the pearl-clutching in this thread, filming rando strangers without consent has always been legal and socially accepted.

It's the prospect of being filmed frequently, and especially in more intimate situations than walking down the street, that is making people uneasy. Flock cameras agitate us because of the frequency of their use. Recording glasses enable the off-the-street problem.

it's even on the site

> Most pairs keep advertising while worn, so you can usually hear them, but a few standalone models stay silent.

I would bet my money that there's a dozen lawyers at work, right now, in Meta's HQ, to get a sense of what options they have to harass, shut down, or do something else to the creator of this app. And I would also bet that Zuck is furious about it.

the demo video really looks ai generated — several weird artifacts, but what bugs me the most is that at the end the alleged glasses-wearer goes through two men between whom clearly there is no space for a third person.

Eta: and in their demo video there's a person walking by who's face doesn't get blurred lmao. Bang up job, Claude

I assume the most problematic scenarios are private. Private meetings. Private conversations. Private encounters of every kind in general. Environment in which ordinary people used to have good enough confidence that, unless they see a phone or a camera, they are not being recorded. It no longer is that simple.

Confirming, at least to some extent, that there is no recording going on may now require confronting the other person. And asking them to remove their glasses or hand them over for inspection might be considered rude.

As a result, I think that it might make people more suspicious and less trusting, especially when meeting new people for the first time.

The shouting match is being loudly won by people decrying the technology however, people can receive physical and verbal abuse on the streets for wearing them which is pretty scary.

The other direction is trickier. You'd have to modify the firmware of the smart glasses to set a different mac, or at least gain arbitrary code execution with hardware access on the glasses. That's well beyond what the average smart glass user will do

And at that point, it'd be mostly about the heads-up display anyways. Somebody who is determined to record you without your knowledge has far easier paths available to them. Just get one of those lighters or ear-rings or car key fobs with built-in camera

He says, deeply immersed in big tech without even realising it.

Their job is to scan the app store for any app that is anti-tech and has at least 1k downloads and write an article about how there's huge backlash.

Yes it's true people have figured out how to disable the safeguard, but we all agree the important thing as we try to sell millions more of these is that we tried, right?

Wouldn’t recommend unless you really, really like nutraloaf