Nearby Glasses

The app, called Nearby Glasses, has one sole purpose: Look for smart glasses nearby and warn you.

This app notifies you when smart glasses are nearby. It uses company identificators in the Bluetooth data sent out by these. Therefore, there likely are false positives (e.g. from VR headsets). Hence, please proceed with caution when approaching a person nearby wearing glasses. They might just be regular glasses, despite this app’s warning.

The app’s author Yves Jeanrenaud takes no liability whatsoever for this app nor it’s functionality. Use at your own risk. By technical design, detecting Bluetooth LE devices might sometimes just not work as expected. I am no graduated developer. This is all written in my free time and with knowledge I taught myself. False positives are likely. This means, the app Nearby Glasses may notify you of smart glasses nearby when there might be in fact a VR headset of the same manufacturer or another product of that company’s breed. It may also miss smart glasses nearby. Again: I am no pro developer. However, this app is free and it's source is available (though it's not considered foss due to the non-commercial restrition), you may review the code, change it and re-use it (under the license). The app Nearby Glasses does not store any details about you or collects any information about you or your phone. There are no telemetry, no ads, and no other nuisance. If you install the app via Play Store, Google may know something about you and collect some stats. But the app itself does not. If you choose to store (export) the logfile, that is completely up to you and your liability where this data go to. The logs are recorded only locally and not automatically shared with anyone. They do contain little sensitive data; in fact, only the manufacturer ID codes of BLE devices encountered.

Use with extreme caution! As stated before: There is no guarantee that detected smart glasses are really nearby. It might be another device looking technically (on the BLE adv level) similar to smart glasses. Please do not act rashly. Think before you act upon any messages (not only from this app).

Why?

• Because I consider smart glasses an intolerable intrusion, consent neglecting, horrible piece of tech that is already used for making various and tons of equally truely disgusting 'content'. 1, 2
• Some smart glasses feature small LED signifying a recording is going on. But this is easily disabled, whilst manufacturers claim to prevent that and take no responsibility at all (tech tends to do that for decades now). 3
• Smart glasses have been used for instant facial recognition before 4 and reportedly will be out of the box 5. This puts a lot of people in danger.
• I hope this is app is useful for someone.