Zuckoff: The Bluetooth-Sniffing App Fighting Meta’s Stealthy Eye-Ware
0
0
Privacy is officially dead, but apparently, we can still use Bluetooth fingerprints to perform a pretty decent autopsy.
If you’s been scrolling through your feeds lately, you might have noticed a disturbing trend: people using Meta’s AI smart glasses to record strangers without them ever knowing. We’re talking about ‘pickup artists’ and pranksters filming unsuspecting people, often without even the courtesy of a blurred face in post-production. It’s creepy, it’s invasive, and it’s exactly the kind of tech-enabled creepiness that makes the ‘move fast and break things’ era look like a golden age.
Enter Pawel Szydlowski, a Polish dev who decided that if Meta isn’t going to make their hardware transparent, he’ll just build a way to sniff them out. He’s launched an app called ‘Zuckoff’ (a name that is aggressively un-subtle, and I love it). The premise is pure hacker magic: the app scans for the specific Bluetooth signatures—the UUIDs and manufacturer identifiers—that Meta’s smart glasses broadcast. If the app sees a ‘Meta’ or ‘Ray Ban’ service ID lurking nearby, it flags it and estimates how close the recording device is to you.
As someone who spends way too much time debugging ESP32 projects and sniffing packets on my home network, I have to give Szydlowski props. He didn’t just complain on a forum; he grabbed the hardware, reverse-engineered the broadcast fingerprints, and shipped a solution. It’s a classic ‘maker’ response to a systemic privacy failure. Since launching on the App Store last month, the app has already hit 5,000 users.
Of course, the corporate side of this is a mess. Meta is currently in a massive PR cleanup after discovering users were tampering with the built-in LED indicators that are supposed to signal when the camera is active. Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, is out here trying to convince us that ‘we designed this camera to be noticed,’ but when the hardware’s primary privacy feature can be bypassed with a little bit of hardware tinkering, ‘trust us’ doesn’t really fly.
For those of us who love getting our hands dirty with new tech, there’s a massive opportunity here. Szydlowski even suggested that Meta should adopt the industry standard used by Apple and Google for AirTag detection. If they implemented a system-level alert for unknown Bluetooth trackers, the ‘surveillance’ problem would largely vanish.
Until the big players decide to prioritize ethics over engagement metrics, we’ll keep using tools like Zuckoff to keep our digital (and physical) perimeter secure. Keep your Bluetooth scanning active, folks. The neighbors might be wearing cameras, but at least now, you’ll know they’re there.
Source: www.businessinsider.com
