Privacy

Every tool on this site runs in your browser. What you paste into one is never uploaded, never logged, and never seen by anybody, including me. That is not a promise about how carefully the data is handled once it arrives somewhere. It never arrives anywhere.

You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser's network panel and watch it stay silent while you type, or disconnect from the network and keep using the tools.

Who is responsible

helio.tools is run by Charlie Gallie, in England, as an individual rather than a company. For anything on this page, including any of the requests described under your rights, write to hello@helio.tools.

What gets stored, and where

There are three things, and two of them never leave your device.

Your settings, on your own machine

Each tool remembers how you left it, in your browser's local storage, under keys beginning heliotools:. That is a store on your computer that this site can read and nobody else can. It is not sent anywhere and there is no copy of it.

Some fields are deliberately left out of it. A signing key, a token, a Wi-Fi password and a password exclusion list are held only for as long as the tab is open. Clearing site data in your browser removes the rest.

Your answer about analytics, also on your own machine

Whether you said yes or no is kept in local storage underheliotools:consent, and deliberately not in a cookie: a site asking permission to set a cookie should not have to set one to record the answer. The Cookies link at the bottom of every page brings the question back if you want to give a different answer.

Google Analytics, but only if you agree to it

If you say yes, the page loads Google Analytics (measurement IDG-W8VCTCDY2L), which counts the visit and records roughly where it came from. It is fetched once when the page is and never sees a keystroke, so it can tell that somebody opened the Base64 tool and nothing at all about what they encoded.

What Google receives when it runs:

• the page you are on, and the page you arrived from
• your approximate location, worked out by Google from your IP address
• your browser, operating system, device type and screen size
• two cookies, _ga and _ga_W8VCTCDY2L, which let it recognise the same browser on a later visit. They expire after two years unless you clear them sooner.

Saying no is not a setting that quietens it down. The request to Google is never made, the script never loads, its cookies are never written, and any it wrote before you changed your mind are deleted.

The lawful basis is your consent, under Article 6(1)(a) of the UK GDPR and regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. You can withdraw it at any time using the Cookies link, and withdrawing it is as easy as giving it.

Google acts as a data processor for the analytics and may transfer data outside the UK. Their own terms describe the safeguards they use for that.

Cloudflare, which serves the pages

The site is hosted on Cloudflare, so a request for a page reaches their network before it reaches anything of mine. In the course of delivering it they process your IP address and standard request information for security and for making the site work at all. This happens whatever you answer about analytics, because it is how the page gets to you.

The lawful basis is legitimate interests, under Article 6(1)(f): specifically, serving a website and protecting it from abuse. Cloudflare acts as a processor and their privacy documentation covers what they keep and for how long.

How long any of it is kept

• Settings and your consent answer: until you clear your browser's site data. They are on your machine, so this is entirely up to you.
• Analytics: Google retains event data for 14 months, and the cookies expire after two years.
• Cloudflare request logs: retained by Cloudflare under their own policy, which for this plan is a matter of days rather than months.

What is not here

There are no accounts, no sign-up, no contact form, no newsletter, no advertising, no advertising network, no social media buttons and no third-party scripts other than the Google Analytics described above. Nothing on this site profiles you or makes automated decisions about you.

Accounts are planned, as the way to pay for premium tools. When they arrive this page will be rewritten before they do, not after.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you can ask for access to any personal data held about you, its correction or erasure, a restriction on how it is used, a copy of it in a portable form, or you can object to it being used at all. You can also withdraw consent for analytics at any time.

In practice there is very little here to ask about, because almost everything stays on your device where I cannot reach it. A request about the analytics data is mostly a request to Google, and I will help with it. Write to hello@helio.tools and you will get an answer within a month.

Complaining

If you think your data has been handled badly, please tell me first, but you are entitled to go straight to the regulator instead. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office, atico.org.ukor on 0303 123 1113.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the date below changes with it, and anything that needs your consent will ask for it again rather than assuming the old answer still applies.

Last updated 17 August 2026.