EchoLens
How it works

Trust

Privacy

Last updated 26 August 2026

Founder draft. EchoLens is in private beta. This document describes how the product actually works today and has not been reviewed by counsel. It will be replaced before public launch.

What EchoLens stores

EchoLens analyses publicly available video. For each source it keeps the official metadata returned by the YouTube Data API — title, creator, duration, publication date, thumbnail — and the analysis it derives from that source: an argument, summaries, chapters, claims, entities and timestamps.

What EchoLens does not store

  • No source audio or video. Nothing is downloaded or re-hosted.
  • No transcripts, and none are published.
  • No account, name, email address or password — there are no accounts.
  • No raw IP addresses.

What we keep about you

No account is required. To keep the free tier workable we set one httpOnly cookie holding an opaque session identifier, and we record product events — a page view, a submission, a timestamp click — against that identifier so we can tell whether the product works.

We also derive a coarse abuse signal by hashing your IP address and browser user-agent together with a secret that rotates daily. The raw IP is never written down, and the hash stops being a stable identifier after 24 hours.

Third parties

  • Google — the YouTube Data API supplies source metadata, and Gemini performs the analysis by reading the public source URL. The URL you submit is sent to both.
  • YouTube — Lens pages embed the original player using the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain. Playing a video is a request to YouTube and is subject to Google’s privacy policy.

There are no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics vendor.

Sharing

A Lens has a permanent URL. Anyone with that link can read the analysis, so treat a Lens link as public even though analysis pages are excluded from search indexes during private beta.

Limits and retention

Free use is capped at 1 fresh analysis per 24 hours and sources of up to 60 minutes. Analyses are cached and reused, so opening an existing Lens costs nothing and creates no new record of the source. We have not yet set a retention schedule for product events; that will be defined before public launch.

Contact

Use the content report form to raise a privacy concern, a rights issue, or a request to remove a Lens.