Brazilian Canadian product and user experience (UX) designer Marcos Rezende has built a new privacy-focused mobile application with AI.
Rezende previously worked at Microsoft and spends his days as a senior product designer at Kitchener-Waterloo event marketing platform Hive. He recently launched NearLens on the side to help iPhone users navigate a world where smart glasses with cameras are becoming increasingly present and hard to spot.
Rezende’s free iOS app listens for Bluetooth signals associated with camera-equipped eyewear, and tracks matches in real time.
In an interview with BetaKit, Ottawa-based Rezende said NearLens’ focus is to give its users a signal that they are in the vicinity of camera glasses, such as Ray-Ban Meta, that could be actively recording.
Rezende’s free iOS app listens for Bluetooth signals associated with camera-equipped eyewear, and tracks matches in real time. As App Developer Magazine put it, NearLens is “a practical response to a growing gap in how smart glasses affect everyday privacy.”
Camera-equipped smart glasses, and their ability to fairly easily record others without their knowledge, have spurred backlash and present new challenges under Canadian privacy law.
For his part, Rezende has taken care to ensure that NearLens does not create new privacy concerns of its own. A NearLens post claims the app does not access cameras or microphones, identify wearers, or confirm if glasses are capturing photographs and footage. Rezende said he has done this “to guarantee privacy end-to-end.” Rezende shipped the first version of NearLens with the help of AI tools after 328 software commits in two weeks. He said the idea came out of a postgraduate project at Lisbon’s IADE. NearLens has “no backend at all,” does not require accounts, compile analytics, or leverage any third-party software development kits, and runs using on-device AI where available.
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Rezende also plans to keep NearLens free. He sees the app as a temporary solution until society determines where it wants to allow these devices, and how it plans to approach them.
For its part, Meta recently said daily usage of its smart glasses tripled year-over-year. Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the wearable eyewear as “one of the fastest-growing categories of consumer electronics ever.” Rezende recently put NearLens to the test in four different locations to get a sense of how common they actually are at the moment. At Ottawa’s TD Place Arena, his app detected 15 signals consistent with camera-equipped smart glasses among 7,000 people over three hours. Whereas at the city’s Meridian Theatres, it returned zero matches.
A recent Business of Fashion-McKinsey report singled out smart glasses as poised for growth in 2026, when analysts project sales to quadruple thanks to a bevy of sleeker, cheaper options.
With files from Jesse Cole.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Redd Francisco.