The most common questions, answered

NearLens scans for Bluetooth signals from smart glasses and tells you when one is nearby. You get a discreet alert with an estimated distance and the level of confidence behind the match.

The purpose is awareness. Knowing a camera may be in the room lets you decide how to act, which is a choice you do not currently have.

Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta, Snap Spectacles, and EssilorLuxottica smart eyewear are matched against a database of registered Bluetooth manufacturer identifiers.

Devices from brands outside that database can still be flagged through signal pattern analysis, though with lower confidence. That is covered further down.

No. NearLens detects that a device is present. Recording state is not broadcast over Bluetooth, so no app can read it from outside the glasses.

Presence is still useful information. A camera that might be recording is a different situation from no camera at all.

No, and it never will. NearLens reads a device signal, not a person. There is no identity, no photo, no name, and no way to link a detection to an individual.

There is also no map, no shared feed, and no way to send a detection to another user. Those features were left out on purpose, because a tool built to protect people should not make it easier to target them.

When someone lifts a phone to record you, you see it and you can respond. Smart glasses are designed to disappear on a face. The person being recorded gets no signal, no consent request, and no way to opt out.

That gap is the reason NearLens exists. It does not close the gap. It makes the gap visible to the person standing on the wrong side of it.

The original problem was not recording. It was the absence of any signal that recording was even possible. When someone raises a phone toward you, you see it. You can look away, leave, ask them to stop, decide you are fine with it. Smart glasses remove that signal entirely. The wearer knows. The person being recorded does not. That asymmetry is what NearLens is built against.

Knowing changes the decision point. Before NearLens, the choice to leave, stay, ask, or document was impossible because the information did not exist. The app returns one signal: not proof of recording, not the wearer's identity, just presence. That is enough to make a decision rather than have no decision at all.

Marcos's honest position, after seven interviews with smart glasses owners and six field tests across four cities, is that it is genuinely useful and genuinely insufficient. The structural fix is consent design at the platform level, not a detection app. NearLens treats a symptom. It does that honestly, and does not pretend otherwise.

Yes, by design. A phone camera requires the user to raise a device to their face, which is a visible act. Smart glasses have no equivalent signal: the camera sits inside the frame, there is no viewfinder, no shutter sound unless the manufacturer adds one, and no indicator that bystanders can read from a normal distance.

Ray-Ban Meta, for example, has a small white LED that lights while recording, but it is easy to miss in ambient light, and at least one documented modification removed it entirely. NearLens exists because the visual cue that phone cameras provide does not reliably transfer to wearables.

Ray-Ban Meta glasses are currently the most discussed, following 2024 reporting by 404 Media and The New York Times documenting their use alongside facial-recognition tools in public. Snap Spectacles have attracted similar concern since the original version launched in 2016. EssilorLuxottica smart eyewear and Oakley Meta are manufactured through the same Meta partnership and share the same Bluetooth identifier space.

Newer products including Meta Orion and a growing range of camera-capable frames from smaller brands expand the category further each year. NearLens uses a manufacturer identifier database for known brands and pattern analysis for everything else.

None. There is no account, no analytics, no telemetry, and no crash reporting. Nothing about you is measured, stored remotely, or sold.

A privacy app that harvested its own users would defeat its purpose. The architecture removes the possibility rather than promising restraint.

iOS requires location permission before any app can scan for Bluetooth devices. It is a system rule, not a request for your position.

NearLens does not read your coordinates, does not store a location, and has nowhere to send one. If you would rather verify that yourself, the app runs fully offline.

When Save Detection History is on, entries are kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically. You can clear the full log at any time from within the app.

Switching phones or restoring from a backup does not recover the history, because it is never uploaded anywhere. Deleting the app deletes all history immediately.

Only if you turn it on. Save Detection History is off by default and lives entirely on your device.

You can clear it at any time, and deleting the app deletes the history with it. Nothing is backed up to a server, because there is no server.

Not for anything that matters. Detection, history, and the AI features all run on your phone with zero network calls.

Put the device in airplane mode with Bluetooth on and the app works exactly as it does otherwise. That is the simplest way to confirm the claim without taking anyone at their word.

No. NearLens only listens for the advertising packet that every Bluetooth device broadcasts openly to announce itself. No pairing is attempted, nothing is intercepted, and nothing is decrypted.

The wearer is not contacted, notified, or affected in any way.

Every Bluetooth Low Energy device broadcasts a manufacturer identifier registered with the Bluetooth SIG. That broadcast is public by design.

NearLens works in three layers. It matches those identifiers against known smart glasses hardware, it checks device names for recognizable patterns, and for anything unmatched it runs a signal analysis on your device to estimate whether the profile resembles smart glasses.

A confirmed match against a known manufacturer identifier is the strongest result. Below that, a device scoring above 75 percent on signal analysis is labelled likely smart glasses, and one scoring between 55 and 75 percent is labelled possible. Anything lower is ignored.

The app names the method behind every result. You should always be able to tell a confirmed match from an estimate.

It marks a device that matched nothing in the manufacturer database and was classified by its signal characteristics instead. The app looks at eight properties, including payload size, signal structure, whether the device accepts connections, estimated distance, and wearable vocabulary in the device name.

This layer exists because a database only knows about hardware that already shipped. It runs as code on your phone, with no model downloaded and no data sent anywhere.

No. A device that is not broadcasting cannot be detected by any Bluetooth scanner. NearLens sees no more than the glasses choose to announce.

The same applies to walls and direction. Signal strength gives a rough distance, not a location.

In field testing at a large arena, NearLens identified 15 likely smart glasses with no confirmed false positives. In a separate test at a theatre it observed 823 Bluetooth devices and flagged none, which was the correct result for that room.

Both numbers are worth reporting. A detection tool that never returns nothing is not measuring anything.

Bluetooth Low Energy range depends on the environment. In open space, NearLens can pick up advertising packets from 10 to 15 metres away. In a dense venue with many competing signals and physical obstacles, that drops to roughly 5 to 8 metres.

The app labels each detection with an estimated distance (within arm's reach, same room, or nearby), derived from signal strength, not precise measurement. Range is also affected by whether the glasses are facing toward your phone and whether the wearer has them paired to another device.

Any camera-capable glasses that broadcast a Bluetooth signal can potentially be detected, whether it is a named product like Ray-Ban Meta or an unbranded camera-glasses device sold through consumer electronics retailers. Unbranded devices have no entry in the manufacturer identifier database, so they are handled by pattern analysis rather than a confirmed match.

That produces a lower-confidence label (possible rather than confirmed), but a detection is still surfaced if the signal profile is a close enough match to a known wearable pattern. Hidden camera glasses and spy glasses that advertise over Bluetooth fall into this category.

A way to ask questions about your own detection history in plain language. Which brand appears most often, whether the same device showed up twice this week, what time of day you get the most detections.

It runs on the language model built into iOS. Your question, your history, and the answer all stay on the phone.

Privacy Intelligence is an on-device report that summarises your detection history. It shows which brands appeared most often, what time of day detections peak, how many unique devices were seen across the week, and which day had the most activity.

Like everything else in the app, it runs entirely on your phone using Apple's on-device model. Nothing is sent to a server. It requires iPhone 15 Pro or newer with Apple Intelligence enabled, the same requirement as Ask NearLens.

The feature needs an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, iOS 26, and Apple Intelligence switched on in system settings. All three are required.

The app checks before showing the question field and names the condition that is missing. Detection itself works on every supported iPhone regardless.

Yes. Snooze for 15 minutes, for one hour, or for the rest of the session.

Alerts are haptic first and use pink rather than red, so a detection stays private to you and reads as information instead of an emergency. Constant agitation is not the goal.

Decide for yourself how you want to act, the same way you would after noticing a security camera. Move, adjust what you say, or carry on.

Do not approach or confront anyone. A detection tells you a device is nearby. It does not tell you who is wearing it, whether it is recording, or anything about that person's intent. Using NearLens to accuse a stranger would recreate the problem the app was built to address.

NearLens is free. There is no subscription, no advertising, and no data to sell because none is collected.

The app is currently iOS only.

NearLens is built specifically for detecting camera-capable smart glasses. General-purpose Bluetooth scanners list every device in range (earbuds, fitness trackers, speakers, keyboards) without any smart glasses classification, confidence scoring, or manufacturer identifier database for eyewear brands.

NearLens filters that noise down to one category of device and surfaces only what is relevant to the privacy concern the app is built around. There is no comparable App Store app focused on smart glasses detection specifically.

No. There is no paid tier and no features held back. Every user gets the same app.

The costs that make this possible - Apple's developer programme, the infrastructure behind this website, and the ongoing work of maintaining and improving the app - are covered personally by Marcos Rezende. He believes the value of putting a privacy tool in as many hands as possible outweighs the cost of keeping it free, and that has not changed.

If you work on something that connects with what NearLens is trying to do - research, privacy advocacy, product design, or anything in between - Marcos is open to partnerships and conversations that help this go further. Reach him at hello@marcosrezende.com.