Bystander notice
The industry's answer to the person standing next to a pair is a small LED nobody sees.
On a scan of TD Place Arena in Ottawa, 15 signals compatible with known smart-glasses profiles surfaced in a crowd of about 7,000 people. That is not the peak of adoption. That is the floor, before Meta, Ray-Ban, Xiaomi, and the wider Chinese OEM catalogue ship the volumes their 2026 roadmaps promise. The industry's answer to the person standing next to one of those pairs is a small LED on the frame that a marketing campaign was built to defend before a firmware patch was written to fix it. Two patches shipped this year. Neither one reached the assumption underneath, which is that a recording light amounts to consent.
NearLens is an iOS app that detects compatible smart-glasses signals over Bluetooth Low Energy, released under AGPL, available on the App Store in Canada and internationally, and built in Ottawa. It does one thing: it reports which compatible signals are nearby, so that decisions about how you behave in a room are yours instead of the wearer's.
Detection is a lower bar than consent. The consent bar is where the law needs to end up. NearLens is what the room looks like while we get there.
Canada's National AI Strategy
What Canada's AI Strategy names, and where it stops.
AI for All: Canada's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy
The document is careful, and in several places it is correct. Pillar 1 commits to modernizing privacy law to safeguard children's information from exploitation and harm, and to introducing online safety laws to protect Canadians in the digital age. It names deepfakes as a form of sexual violence, particularly against women and children. It commits to transparency so that Canadians can tell when they are interacting with an AI system, including watermarking of AI-generated content.
What the Strategy does not name is the physical version of the same problem. When the camera is on a face rather than in a hand, the capture is silent, the notice is a light nobody sees, and the harm arrives downstream, in distribution and in facial recognition.
Futurism reported this year on American teenage boys using smart glasses to harass and film female classmates in high school. There is no reason to expect Canadian schools to be an exception, and the standard advice given to bystanders, walk away, does not describe a classroom.
The full strategy released September 4, 2026. Hosted locally for accessibility and permanence.
Download PDFWhere NearLens fits
Three pieces of the Strategy point at what NearLens is already doing.
Three pieces of the Strategy point at what NearLens is already doing.
Pillar 1 asks for transparency about when Canadians are interacting with AI systems. NearLens provides that transparency in the one place the Strategy has not yet reached, which is the physical room.
On Pillar 2, the Strategy defines participation as individuals deciding when and how AI belongs in their daily lives. NearLens is the small, concrete version of that principle. A person walking into a café can see whether compatible signals were observed nearby before deciding how they want to sit in it.
On Pillar 6, which advances open-source AI as a counterweight to closed platforms, the match is direct. NearLens is AGPL, independent of venture capital, and adaptable by anyone who wants to fork it. If the Government of Canada is serious about supporting civic-tech alternatives to concentrated platforms, an app that exists to make those platforms visible in the room is one.
Detection is a lower bar than consent. The consent bar is where the law needs to end up. NearLens is what the room looks like while we get there.
Who is building this
A decade of AI-adjacent product design, and a research base that started in the field.
NearLens is built and maintained by Marcos Rezende, a senior product designer based in Kanata, Ottawa, with more than a decade of work in AI-adjacent product design and published writing on privacy and agentic systems.
- Owner interviews and six field observations across Ottawa, Toronto, San Francisco, and Washington DC
- 1,564 Bluetooth Low Energy devices logged in situ
- Coverage by BetaKit, App Developer Magazine, Tom's Hardware Italy, innovations.fr, and TechNX
- Submitted to the AI-X Award
Current work includes expanding Bluetooth fingerprinting coverage for the Chinese-market smart-glasses catalogue and passing structured field data to advocacy groups working under GDPR and CCPA.
Chinese-market catalogue under active research
- Xiaomi
- Huawei
- Alibaba Quark
- Baidu
- Rokid
- RayNeo
- XREAL
- INMO
- VITURE
For journalists, policy contacts, and school administrators
If you are a journalist, a policy contact, or a school administrator with an emerging incident, the email below is the fastest route in.