Marcos Rezende wants to let users know they might be getting discreetly recorded.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Brazilian Canadian product and user experience (UX) designer Marcos Rezende has built a new privacy-focused mobile application with AI.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> on the side to help iPhone users navigate a world where smart glasses with cameras are becoming increasingly present and hard to spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rezende\u2019s free iOS app listens for Bluetooth signals associated with camera-equipped eyewear, and tracks matches in real time.<\/p>\n In an interview with BetaKit, Ottawa-based Rezende said NearLens\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Rezende\u2019s free iOS app listens for Bluetooth signals associated with camera-equipped eyewear, and tracks matches in real time. As App Developer Magazine<\/a> put it, NearLens is \u201ca practical response to a growing gap in how smart glasses affect everyday privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n Camera-equipped smart glasses, and their ability to fairly easily record others without their knowledge, have spurred backlash<\/a> and present new challenges<\/a> under Canadian privacy law.<\/p>\n For his part, Rezende has taken care to ensure that NearLens does not create new privacy concerns of its own. A NearLens post<\/a> 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 \u201cto guarantee privacy end-to-end.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s IADE. NearLens has \u201cno backend at all,\u201d does not require accounts, compile analytics, or leverage any third-party software development kits, and runs using on-device AI where available.\u00a0<\/p>\n RELATED: Google reportedly close to buying Canada\u2019s AdHawk for its eye-tracking smart glasses tech<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n For its part, Meta recently said<\/a> daily usage of its smart glasses tripled year-over-year. Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the wearable eyewear as \u201cone of the fastest-growing categories of consumer electronics ever.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Meridian Theatres, it returned zero matches.<\/p>\n A recent Business of Fashion-McKinsey report singled out smart glasses as poised for growth<\/a> in 2026, when analysts project sales to quadruple thanks to a bevy of sleeker, cheaper options.<\/p>\n With files from Jesse Cole.<\/p>\n Feature image courtesy Unsplash<\/a>. Photo by Redd Francisco<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marcos Rezende wants to let users know they might be getting discreetly recorded.
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