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ZuckOff Know when a camera is in the room

170 pointsby 1h agozuckoff.app
64 comments
37m agoHN ↗

Yes, the name is absolutely a genius move.

I would bet my money that there's a dozen lawyers at work, right now, in Meta's HQ, to get a sense of what options they have to harass, shut down, or do something else to the creator of this app. And I would also bet that Zuck is furious about it.

22m agoHN ↗

At least one lawyer looking at it? Sure, maybe. But this is probably not even registering on Zuck's radar

21m agoHN ↗

You'd be surprised. They banned Christopher Wylie from Facebook. People routinely report their entire team (building some product for Facebook) getting their accounts banned

Zuckerberg takes things personally. It's his entire history

16m agoHN ↗

I can't claim to know more than you; but I think I know enough about corporate america and Meta and Zuck that the idea of multiple lawyers, instead of just one, is at least plausible.

16m agoHN ↗

He's extremely petty and fhin skinned. Remember the seat booster?

21m agoHN ↗

Somewhere deep in the central European woods, a lonely dev fights for his life, against a dead man switch. Accidentally, a NATO drone flattened his house into glass a week ago. Now, he evades drones, rabid lawyers, train accidents, Starlink honey traps, sudden internet blackouts of unknown origin, regular honey traps, poisoned whiskey, social media bans and dowvotes ...

... if you can find him, you can hire him, and restore privacy and sanity to your apps. he is ... the ZuckOff dev.-

7m agoHN ↗

I'm guessing it's not even aware of it. The billionaires all live in their own reality.

41m agoHN ↗

*knows when a pair of camera glasses are in the room

33m agoHN ↗

Does it beep louder as the BT signal strength changes and the camera comes closer?

20m agoHN ↗

Bring along a small Bluetooth speaker and call out pervs in public!

5m agoHN ↗

Wait, doesn't it beep for smartphone cameras too?

29m agoHN ↗

It says:

Flags camera glasses by their manufacturer signature <

How is this guaranteed to be not spoofed?

27m agoHN ↗

Where does it say that is guaranteed? Nobody can guarantee that.

13m agoHN ↗

Anyone can get a $5 bluetooth-capable ESP32 and set its bluetooth mac to one in the range used by smart glasses. Not sure why you'd do that though.

The other direction is trickier. You'd have to modify the firmware of the smart glasses to set a different mac, or at least gain arbitrary code execution with hardware access. That's well beyond what the average smart glass user will do

And at that point, it'd be mostly about the heads-up display anyways. Somebody who is determined to record you without your knowledge has far easier paths available to them. Just get one of those lighters or ear-rings or car key fobs with built-in camera

28m agoHN ↗

Reading this inspired me that it would be nice if there were a do-not-film-me standard: your mobile phone sends out a do-not-film-me request with a (rotating) hash of your facial biometrics via Bluetooth. All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.

Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.

24m agoHN ↗

These are social problems not technology problems.

We want a society that does not need these workarounds.

24m agoHN ↗

We also want a society that is less greedy but that will never happen.

22m agoHN ↗

Which won't happen as criminals will never want themselves filmed and they are the ones you want to film to make society better and protect yourself.

17m agoHN ↗

Haven't you got that the wrong way around?

If we have to come up with a technological solution to grant anonymity when people are filming, criminals can use it.

If we as a society don't go around filming everyone all the time, we don't need that technical solution available, so we can film the criminals when they are doing something criminal.

21m agoHN ↗

You can't trust humans to follow the rules. They break rules all the time. Look at the HN community.

17m agoHN ↗

Humans adapt and will always break the rules, but that’s not something that can be solved with tech. Think: prohibition vs public anti smoking campaigns/healthcare support/and then increasing prices

15m agoHN ↗

Indeed.

The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.

Naming and shaming requires names.

22m agoHN ↗

All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.

that requires too much goodwill and effort from the makers of such devices. They know their audience wouldn't want that. They don't give a shit about what people being filmed think.

20m agoHN ↗

Culture/social pressures work better than purely technical solutions

22m agoHN ↗

Why do we need a standard for something that should socially be the norm?

17m agoHN ↗

Wasn't there a "standard" that phones in south kora had to make a shutter noise when you took a picture because they had such a huge problem with men doing up the skirt photos of strangers?

Not sure why you think social norms are positive. Negative amoral behaviors can become norms. I'd argue the west has tons of amoral behavior that is normalized.

5m agoHN ↗

Not sure about the noise, but Japan did something likr it with a constant light when the device was recording. I believe it was combatting the same kind of issues though.

15m agoHN ↗

Because some people would still smoke in restaurants and airplanes if left to their own devices.

14m agoHN ↗

Why do we need laws against stealing bikes?

(Yes, example chosen for its reputation for indifferent enforcement.)

13m agoHN ↗

Technical and legal norms are implementation of social norms. “obviously everybody knows that you are supposed to do it that way” doesnt hold up well at court, or during an argument about any decision that costs big bucks.

21m agoHN ↗

Police unions would love for cameras to standardize on that.

There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).

17m agoHN ↗

That’s an admission of guilt by the police, right there. If you have nothing to hide… etc.

7m agoHN ↗

“We’ve got ‘em now!”. This’ll be police brutality’s great undoing.

12m agoHN ↗

Wouldn't that constitute a public performance of copyrighted material? The police themselves could be DMCAed. Haha

12m agoHN ↗

Did the police have the appropriate license to play those disney songs in a public space?

11m agoHN ↗

Wouldn't that be covered by fair use?

Nobody who loves Disney songs would listen to them while also hearing police officers shouting, etc.

7m agoHN ↗

You’re right. Tech companies will surprise us all and suddenly start obeying the DMCA to the letter instead of just taking the shortcut of “rights holders upload content, it’s fingerprinted, user content that matches fingerprint is taken down”. Then, we’ll link arms and sing kumbaya.

6m agoHN ↗

"Wouldn't that be covered by fair use?"

There's no human to appeal to in social media platforms. It's automated, algorithmic enforcement; and when it's wrong (or someone exploits it to be wrong, like this), you're powerless to do anything. What's legal or not has no bearing.

5m agoHN ↗

Theoretically, yes, absolutely. Practically, no, they would be taken down by automatic filters and you'd have to be willing to face Disney's lawyers to try to get them reinstated.

3m agoHN ↗

Wouldn't that be covered by fair use?

This has never once prevented a DMCA notice from being issued, and I'm sure you can guess how easy it is to get a person at YouTube to review your appeal

14m agoHN ↗

hash of your facial biometrics via Bluetooth

Sounds like a swift way to be included in "Need constant observation" list. Or we can even build a special surveillance for such folks along with plausible Parallel construction scenario constantly refreshed.

6m agoHN ↗

Why not make filming opt-in rather than opt-out?

25m agoHN ↗

Amazing. But it won't work for long, they'll patch the BT beacons with some "privacy" mode :(

7m agoHN ↗

And even if not - could always make another device with the same company ID and flood everyone with false positives.

23m agoHN ↗

v2.0 ... auto-project two middle fingers at the recording camera, in place of the recorded subjects face.

23m agoHN ↗

cool solution to a problem that shouldnt even exist I'd say. how did it become ok to be recorded at all times without prior consent??

5m agoHN ↗

First they filmed the celebrities, then the politicians, then the cops, then came the ring cameras. It was a slow erosion over decades, the justification drifting from "they are a public figure" to "they are standing near me"

I never knew why the paparazzi could harass celebrities and a few decades later we are all being secretly filmed for a Meta perv database.

5m agoHN ↗

A major factor is that the companies pushing for this technology are spending significant resources into making sure your consent isn't relevant. From this article [1] about Meta and smart glasses:

Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.

(…) The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. (…) Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re... or https://archive.is/65Fze

20m agoHN ↗

Cool idea, but why not spend 5 minutes to tell Claude to generate something besides the default AI UI style for your app?

19m agoHN ↗

I was going to say: can't wait for EU to regulate this, but they already did!

18m agoHN ↗

Sorry to be that guy but:

Quiet is not proof that nobody is recording, and a detection is not proof that anyone is

Is such claudespeak it’s not even annoying it’s just funny at this point

16m agoHN ↗

Own a pair? Add them to known devices

Oh, the hypocrisy

16m agoHN ↗

I... don't know how I feel about this. I mean, the concept, sure, good idea. Is it reliable? Perhaps. But... I get a "buy merch" popup the moment I open the page, and there seems to be a pro option for what seems to be a very much LLM-aided app? ...IDK, rubs off a bit wrong IMO. Just my personal opinion.

14m agoHN ↗

I like the idea of this type of merch that normalizes anti big tech sentiment. But I personally would also opt for something more dramatic, possibly involving a guillotine...on the t shirt I mean

14m agoHN ↗

I think this will go like this: - Resistance. People don't like being "secretly" filmed. - Most people will realise it does not affect their lives. - People will ignore it - New generation will accept as something normal to do. Everyone recording everyone.

14m agoHN ↗

Need permanent paint spray at protests for just hoodlums. Blast them red commie paints.

13m agoHN ↗

A better solution would be a miniaturized quadrf style device that could see radio sources and overlay them.

11m agoHN ↗

Unlike other commenters, I do not mind the ai-ness of this app. This is a quick solution to a problem that we should not have had in the first place.

5m agoHN ↗

Good to know, now I need to find my flipper zero and build a small app to use the information gained.