Questions, answered straight.

It's a phone app that passively listens for nearby camera-enabled smart glasses — Meta Ray-Ban, Snap Spectacles, and similar devices — and notifies you when one is close enough to matter. Think of it as a radar for smart glasses, not a camera detector for hidden cameras in general.

Every Bluetooth and Wi-Fi device — glasses included — constantly broadcasts short identifying signals just to exist on a network. Glasses Radar listens for those public broadcasts and matches their byte-level signature against a verified fingerprint registry for known camera-glasses hardware.

It's not hacking, intercepting, or connecting to anything — it's reading the same public radio broadcasts any nearby phone already receives.

Yes, with one honest asymmetry: Android gets the full picture — Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals, which lets it tell when glasses are actively streaming or importing photos, not just present. iOS is Bluetooth-only while the app is in the foreground, a restriction Apple places on all apps, not something we chose. It still reliably detects presence — it just can't see the Wi-Fi "active" signal.

It tells you two different things, and we're careful not to blur them: present means matching camera glasses are nearby. active means the device is also doing something that shows up on Wi-Fi, like streaming or importing a capture — a much stronger signal.

What it can't do: prove a specific photo or clip was taken. A device that's paired and capturing straight to onboard storage with no wireless offload emits essentially no signal a phone can see. Presence isn't proof of recording — it's the best honest signal available from outside the device, and we'd rather say that plainly than oversell it.

That's the specific failure mode we built against. Cheaper detectors match on a 2-byte company ID alone — which flags every device from that manufacturer, headphones and headsets included. Glasses Radar matches the full manufacturer-data byte template, and requires several consistent sightings before it commits to an alert, so a single stray packet can't trigger a false alarm.

Doesn't matter to us — we never look at the LED. Detection is entirely radio-based, so it works exactly the same whether the indicator is visible, covered, or the wearer has no idea it exists. The LED was never a reliable signal in the first place; that's the whole reason this app exists.

No. Detection runs entirely on-device — nothing about your location, your scans, or who was near you ever leaves your phone. The only thing that ever talks to a server is an optional, cryptographically signed update to the fingerprint database itself, and that's a download, not an upload.

Glasses Radar only reads signals every nearby device already broadcasts publicly for basic connectivity — the same broadcasts your phone, laptop, and headphones make constantly. It doesn't connect to the glasses, doesn't access anything on them, and doesn't capture or store what they might be recording. It's closer to noticing a device is nearby than to surveillance.

Bluetooth scanning is the core mechanism. Location is required by both Android and iOS to allow any app to scan for Bluetooth devices at all — it's an OS-level rule, not something the app uses for tracking. On Android 13+, Nearby Wi-Fi Devices and Notifications permissions unlock the "active" detection state and let the app actually alert you.

Now — Glasses Radar is available on the App Store and Google Play. Free to download, no account needed.

Yes, genuinely. Accuracy is capped by how many verified device fingerprints are in the registry, and the fastest way to grow it is real hardware. If you're willing to run a short capture with your device, reach out — it directly improves detection for everyone.