Cookie policy

This policy explains the cookies and similar browser storage used by Helikon Labs Inc. on our public website (helikonlabs.com) and on the Helikon platform (app.helikonlabs.com). It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which covers personal data more broadly.

If you are just reading this site, we have not set any cookies at all. A visitor who has not signed in and has not answered the analytics banner receives zero cookies from us. Every cookie below appears only in response to something you did.

A cookie is a small text file a site stores in your browser. We use very few of them, all first-party, and none of them track you. We do not use cookies for advertising, ad retargeting, cross-site tracking, or profile building. We do not sell or share cookie data with advertisers, and we do not operate an advertising network. Our analytics tools do not use cookies either — see section 3.

This is the complete list — and none of these are set until the action in the “what it does” column actually happens.

“Strictly necessary” means the site cannot do what you asked without it — you cannot stay signed in without a session cookie, and we cannot remember that you declined analytics without recording that you declined. These are not subject to consent, because switching them off would simply break the thing you came to do.

We use two analytics tools, and both are off until you accept them. The default is decline: if you never answer the banner, no analytics script is loaded at all. This is enforced in code, not by configuration — the scripts are not rendered onto the page unless consent_v1 reads accepted.

• Plausible Analytics — aggregate page views and referrers. Plausible is a privacy-focused product that does not use cookies and does not track visitors across sites.
• Vercel Speed Insights — page-performance timings (how quickly pages render for real visitors). It measures loading speed, not people, and does not use cookies.

Neither tool sets a cookie, which is why declining analytics does not add a cookie to your browser — only your choice itself is stored, in consent_v1.

Paying for a subscription takes you to Stripe Checkout, a payment page hosted by Stripe on their own domain. Cookies set there are Stripe’s, are used for payment processing and fraud prevention, and are governed by Stripe’s privacy policy rather than this one. We never see your card details.

Links from Helikon to external sites — a researcher’s institutional page, a DOI, a patent record — are ordinary outbound links. Once you follow one, that site’s own cookie policy applies.

To change your analytics choice, delete the consent_v1 cookie for the site in your browser settings and reload the page — the banner will appear again and you can answer differently.

To block or clear cookies generally, every major browser lets you do this from its privacy settings (Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge all group it under Privacy or Cookies and site data). Blocking cookies for app.helikonlabs.com will sign you out and prevent you from signing back in, because the session cookie is how the site knows it is still you.

You do not need to accept analytics to use any part of Helikon. No feature, plan or content is gated on it.

If we add, change or remove a cookie, we update this page as part of the same change. The date at the top of the page is the last time that happened. Material changes to how we use analytics will re-prompt you through the banner rather than relying on you re-reading this page.