Algorithms decide what gets shown to different people in different places — and almost no independent research can see inside them. Echo uses your phone's idle bandwidth to let researchers observe what social media is serving to your geographic area. You don't have to do anything.
Download Echo for Android— people have joined so far
Goal: 1,000 devices across the US
When your phone is idle — screen off, plugged in, on wifi — Echo routes research queries from Lurk Research through your IP address. That means researchers can see what TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube serves to someone in your city, not just to their own accounts in their own city.
Think of it like lending your address for a study. The researchers are the ones knocking on doors. Your phone just tells them which neighborhood they're in.
You can see what's been routed through your device in the app dashboard. You can pause or stop any time. Nothing persists on your phone.
Echo isn't on the Play Store yet — we're in early access while we build out the panel. You'll install it as a direct download (called an APK). Android makes this slightly annoying but it works fine.
Tap the button below on your Android phone. Your browser downloads a file called echo.apk. If it warns "this file can harm your device" — this is completely normal. Android shows that warning for any app that isn't downloaded from the Play Store, regardless of what it is. Tap Download anyway to continue.
Open the downloaded file. Android asks if you want to allow your browser to install apps — tap Settings, turn on Allow from this source, go back, tap Install. This only affects your browser, not your whole phone.
Takes a minute. At the end Android will ask if Echo can run without battery restrictions — tap Allow, otherwise your phone will eventually put it to sleep and it'll stop contributing.
Settings → Apps → Special access → Install unknown apps, find your browser, turn it on. The step 2 prompt doesn't always appear automatically on Samsung.
This is a beta program. Right now we're building the panel and making sure the research actually works — we're not paying participants yet, but we plan to once we've shown it delivers.
What you do get: you're helping mission-aligned organizations — researchers, journalists, democracy nonprofits — understand the state of misinformation and algorithmic targeting across the US. That research will be published and shared publicly.
If you want to be notified when we publish findings, get early access to research results, or hear about compensation when we launch it — drop your email below.
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The ones people actually ask.
You'll notice during onboarding exactly what permissions we ask for. There's no account, no login, and we never ask for your name, email, or phone number. The only permissions Echo requests are: the ability to run a background service (so it keeps working when your screen is off), and battery optimization exemption (so Android doesn't put it to sleep). That's it. No camera, no microphone, no contacts, no location, no access to your files or other apps. The permissions screen is the clearest proof — if we wanted to track you, we'd have to ask for a lot more than that.
Kind of the reverse. A VPN routes your traffic through somewhere else. Echo routes our research traffic through your location. Your browsing goes through your normal internet connection — we're not in the middle of it.
It only runs on wifi, and only when your screen is off. The data usage is minimal — a few MB per day at most. It won't affect your plan and you shouldn't notice it running.
We're submitting it, but Play Store reviews take time and we wanted to start building the panel now. Early access participants get closer access to the research while we're still small. Once we're on Play Store this page will redirect there.
Almost nothing. When your device connects, we log your IP address (so we know what geographic area it represents) and your device model (so we know what Android hardware is in the panel). That's it. You don't give us your name, email, phone number, or address. There's no account. We don't know who you are.
No. We never sell your bandwidth to anyone. Echo is a research project — the only traffic that goes through your device is queries from Lurk Research studying social media algorithms. We're not a commercial proxy service and we have no commercial customers.
Open the app and tap Pause. Or just uninstall it. No account, no subscription, nothing to cancel.