ABOUT

the cameras watching you are broadcasting. beacons lets you see them.

why this exists

ALPR cameras went up across our streets by the thousands, quietly, with no vote and no way to opt out. body cams, trackers, drones, and now the recording smart glasses people wear on the street followed, and the rollout stayed boring on purpose so most people never noticed. but all of it runs on radios, and radios talk. beacons started from one idea: if this equipment is going to watch you, you should get to see it back.

who's behind it

built by me, spencer, aka soyboi: a san diego privacy advocate and devops engineer, working solo, and the person behind istrumpgolfing.today. it's a small, independent project, shaped by friends who spend real time reporting around this kind of surveillance and who actually use it.

what i stand for

›passive by design. it listens, but the detection side never transmits, jams, or spoofs. it's a detector, not a weapon.

›open source, app and firmware. read every line before you trust it. no black box.

›no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry. nothing phones home, because there's no home to phone.

›honest about limits. i tell you what it can't see, not just what it can. a name in a database isn't the same as a device you can detect.

›your data is yours. every detection stays on your device. you own every byte it produces.

how it's made

development happens in the open, so the promise is something you can check, not just something i say. nothing improves behind your back; better detection comes from legwork: i spend hours driving around collecting logs, then compare timestamped sightings against what was actually there before a new signature ships. owners who want to help can send their own logs and findings, timestamps included, to logs@soyboi.tech. those real-world confirmations are the loop that sharpens the next detection, shared on your terms, never taken automatically.

beacons grew out of the open oui-spy detection community, and the firmware runs on colonel panic's oui-spy hardware as well as on the beacon board. it's an independent project, though: not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by colonel panic. "oui-spy" and "mesh-detect" are their product names, mentioned here only to say what hardware is compatible.

the name

a beacon is something that can't help announcing itself. that's exactly what most modern surveillance gear is. to do their jobs, most cameras and sensors chirp constantly over WiFi and bluetooth, whether or not anyone is listening. the name is the whole thesis in four words: the thing built to watch you can't help being watched.

all cameras are beacons.

so i built the thing that hears them.

read the code, or say hello: support@soyboi.tech.

★ star on github how it detects