Connected devices are ubiquitous in our era of wireless chips heavily relying on streaming data to someone else’s servers. This sentence might already start to sound dodgy, and it doesn’t get better when you think about today’s smart glasses, like the ones built by Meta (aka Facebook).
[sh4d0wm45k] doesn’t shy away from fighting fire with fire, and shows you how to build a wireless device detecting Meta’s smart glasses – or any other company’s Bluetooth devices, really, as long as you can match them by the beginning of the Bluetooth MAC address.
[sh4d0wm45k]’s device is a mini light-up sign saying “GLASSHOLE”, that turns bright white as soon as a pair of Meta glasses is detected in the vicinity. Under the hood, a commonly found ESP32 devboard suffices for the task, coupled to two lines of white LEDs on a custom PCB. The code is super simple, sifting through packets flying through the air, and lets you easily contribute with your own OUIs (Organizationally Unique Identifier, first three bytes of a MAC address). It wouldn’t be hard to add such a feature to any device of your own with Arduino code under its hood, or to rewrite it to fit a platform of your choice.
We’ve been talking about smart glasses ever since Google Glass, but recently, with Meta’s offerings, the smart glasses debate has reignited. Due to inherent anti-social aspects of the technology, we can see what’d motivate one to build such a hack. Perhaps, the next thing we’ll see is some sort of spoofed packets shutting off the glasses, making them temporarily inoperable in your presence in a similar way we’ve seen with spamming proximity pairing packets onto iPhones.
I didn’t even know meta was selling smart glasses. I’m real out of the loop. Funny project, I wonder if someone will make a smart phone app for it? You could add signal strength readings as well.
‘smart’ glasses.
All I want is a heads up notification style display. No camera, no AI. (And for sure no ‘Meta’)
I kinda felt like the voice assistant thing might go somewhere. But they didn’t seem as helpful as an average pre-school child. And now with AI and the never ending confident hallucinating I have to say it’s awfully nuts to trust an AI assistant. You wouldn’t hire a person that was as twice as trustworthy and accurate to do anything technical or personal, but people do for AI
Gpt-5 and Gemini 3 have done wonders to significantly decrease their hallucination rates compared to previous models. At some point, the hallucination rates will become acceptable because they keep going down and factuality / being able to be uncertain keep going up.
Just today, Openai released a new method called confessions (https://openai.com/index/how-confessions-can-keep-language-models-honest/) where it basically asks the model if it made something up. Surprisingly, the same models that have hallucinations are good at detecting times that they’ve hallucinated, and it’s a step forward to reducing them just like chain of thought was.
They’re still pretty terrible at finding real sources for information to confirm that what they’re saying is true. Asking GPT-5 something and then demanding it to say where it got it from is a complete hit and miss.
I use my meta glasses to find geo and satellite coordinates for my work….. the AI is flawless. It saves me about 75% of my time on a job every week. While driving to jobsites, sometimes 16 hours away, I also have great AI conversations learning about different subjects. People shouldn’t flatter themselves by thinking that everyone with Meta glasses wants a persons picture. Nearly all with Meta glasses aren’t creeps like the news media wants everyone to believe.
i would like a article about the antisocial aspect of technology
Nothing about technology is antisocial. It’s just when we let sociopaths play with toys it seems that way.
I disagree.
Technology expressly designed to circumvent the consent of one party, when used by another, is antisocial.
Radio waves aren’t antisocial, but a device explicitly designed to interfere with WiFi is.
In the same vein, a camera and HUD aren’t antisocial, but a camera installed on glasses, marketed to people to be worn in public, with local 3rd party biometric collection that is sent to ‘the cloud’, is antisocial.
Sorry but cnlohr is correct.
Now you’re talking about technology and you mean electronics.
But. In the evolution of man, one thing rings true. Any invention, any technology, is at some point used anti socially.
It’s not technology which is the problem, but maybe the ability over time for everyone to access it and or abuse it.
Now if we invented technology that called out people for being anti social.
Oh look. Glasshole detector.
The UK is currently talking about rolling out police facial recognition vans nationally.
Outcry ensues.
Google maps etc al already have social interaction to drop police locations for speeding.
See what happens next.
A technology has no ability to be antisocial than anymore than physics has the ability to be antisocial, it’s the people in control of it that do that to it.
But I’m not sure Hackaday is the place for such philosophical discussions though
This kind of sucks for the people that just use these for the audio.
Yup. Just like people who used original Glass for walking/driving directions and notifications.
People always assumed that Glass was recording, because they were clueless and knew nothing about Glass, like the fact that its rather old SoC combined with tiny battery meant that if someone was recording video, it would maaaaybe last 30 minutes before dying. Also the camera quality was shit.
Yet no one other than the maker of this hack seems to care about Meta’s glasses, the first generation of which literally had no display and could only be used for recording images, which continues to hold true for 2 out of the 3 second-gen models recently announced.
Mine do video, but there is also a recording light.
I don’t trust Meta, or you, not to record me or collect biometric data.
People have already been caught blacking out the camera active LED because they don’t want people hassling them about privacy.
It doesn’t matter if you behaved yourself, the risk is too high, the motivation for breaching trust is too high, and the ease of breaching trust is too high.
Trusting Meta’s privacy claims is like trusting KFC to protect chickens. It is in their best interest not to, so they won’t.
Actually, quite a few people care about metas glasses… Including people who have had medical practitioners wearing them in HIPAA protected settings where video, pictures, and audio recording would absolutely not be allowed without consent, and college females being followed and harassed on campus by randos wearing them but who have plausible deniability because theyre not holding a phone or camera, and you know, that whole stink where some bros were able to configure a setup that provided real time doxxing IRL and social engineer fake prior encounters / acquaintances with random business people in public.
And there are already vendors out there selling fixes to the glasses so that the recording light doesn’t illuminate when recording, so one HAS to assume that they could be recording at any given moment.
I get that in public spaces in the US there’s no personal consent to recording, that’s fine. The real issue is these being worn in non-public spaces, and the use of realtime doxxing in public spaces. I personally think there needs to be countermeasures to provide protection for those concerns, and thus applaud this effort.
I think people using these glasses sucks for everyone else. I absolutely don’t trust Meta with any data, and frankly, I don’t want to live in a world where people are walking around wearing cloud connected video cameras at all moments of their lives. If you’re using them “just for the audio,” why not just use a pair of headphones and a smart phone or a dedicated media player? Give it two years and I’m certain Meta will announce a new partnership with Flock, putting automatic identity recognition on all their glasses.
There are already cameras everywhere connected to stuff you don’t trust, that bird flew the coop decades ago, and if you think headphones and a media player is a substitute then you’re ignorant of what people use the glasses for accessibility-wise. It requires the new hardware and it’s pretty miraculous.
That said, I even think “what about the disabled people” is still a cop-out. People should just be allowed to use them if they want to without being hassled by sneering nerds and neurotics.
I’m not completely disabled, but do have a vision deficiency. Absolutely no vision centrally in the right eye, but a little bit peripherally up and to the right. Since it’s peripheral, there’s no detail discernible.
That means I can’t use those smart glasses even though I thought the idea was amazing when I first heard of the idea when people were coming up with the concepts. By the time Google Glass was offered, I couldn’t even see in true 3D. A damaged right eye also meant I couldn’t use any right-eye displays either. And Meta following behind with a right side display.
Meta’s price is a fraction of Glass’ price and the tech is better but if they can’t also offer a left-side-displaying model then they haven’t really made it for everyone that could benefit from its use
The pictures can’t leave without the application. Headphones cover your ears and are another thing you need to carry with you.
Re: “why not just use headphones” — wearing one thing is less hassle than wearing two things, so the idea of glasses with built-in speakers is quite tempting for those of us who already wear glasses. Not tempting enough for me to be willing to walk around with an AI-powered camera strapped to my face, though…
That’s fun. I made something really similar for my cat’s GPS/Bluetooth collar. He kept stealing dog food and getting fat lol. The ESP32 checks MAC addrs and beeps when the signal power exceeds some threshold. Removing the ESP antenna shortens the range.
Coming soon to smart-glasses everywhere: MAC address randomization
The kind of randomization that would actually hide your smart glasses is unlikely to be an official feature from Meta, Google, etc.
In order to play nice with the IEEE Registration Authority, you can’t randomize the OUI – the initial part of the mac address that identifies what organization that block of MAC addresses belongs to. That’s exactly what this “glasshole detector” is looking for.
Neat, I didn’t realize. Even the Android MAC randomization keeps the OUI prefix
yeah but ethernet/wifi and BT mac addresses are, in this regard, are a bit different. not architecturally but functionally.
for a wifi/ethernet MAC address, you’ll assume a network controller and rightfully so, while bluetooth is functionally not much more than serial over 2.4GHz (yeah I know it’s a bit more complex but whatever, please get my point)
most of the networking stuff happens over IP these days so the manufacturer or the type of the controller doesn’t really matter in this sense. the same can’t be said about bluetooth peripherals, or at least I assume there are a few fundamental differences in the fuctionalities of a wireless headphone and a smart lightbulb, for example.
The OUI does not need to be honoured by a new MAC address. If the seventh bit of the first octet is 1, the first three octets don’t refer to the manufacturer and instead the MAC address is “locally administered”. For example a MAC address for a device connected via DECNet starts AA. If I randomize a MAC address, it starts AE. (This comment brought to you by “Um, actually…”) Bluetooth, Ethernet, WiFi, and alot of other networking “stuff” is regulated by the same industrial organization, yes, a MAC address is a MAC address, and IEEE says what it can or can’t do. Just because Bluetooth is a “personal area network” doesn’t mean it has an immutable value.
My always worn rear-view mirror on my glasses is getting more scrutiny now again since the old Glass came on the scene. All it’d take now is one tiny red light to make it to the word of the year. Rage-bait. There are several means of video rear-view for biking helmets that may make some uneasy. Many bikers have a “dash” cam on. I keep my mirror on because it’s easily lost once off and needed when I hop on.
I think you should be able to wear your cycling rear-view mirror or a piece of electronics on your glasses if you choose, and if people complain you should be able to tell them “gfy” and raise your middle finger, easy solution
Neat hack. In response to those that didn’t like it: 1) it would be unlikely to be deployed outdoors, and 2) within an indoors place not your own, TFS. Talk to whoever runs the local network to see if they’ll whitelist you.
It represents a specific type of person I like to refer to as “technophile Luddite.” It’s contradictory, but it definitely exists anyway
The words Technophile & Luddite do not contradict each other. Luddites were opposed to and fought against tech that threatened their livelihoods & well-being. They weren’t blindly fearful of all technology.
To think technology is cool and interesting and also not want to be surveilled by one of the 4 worst people on the planet doesn’t take a specific type of person.