Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains what information helical.video (“Helical,” “we,” “us”) collects when you use the Service, why we collect it, and how it's handled. It covers the customer-facing site and order flow; it does not cover the separate operator/worker tooling used to run the physical tape deck.

Contact information.The email address you provide at checkout, used to create your customer record, send your order's magic sign-in link, and notify you about your order (e.g. preview ready, payment issue).

Your uploaded video and its outputs. The video file you upload, stored in cloud object storage, along with the files we generate from it: the preview clip shown before you approve, a thumbnail frame, and the final full-quality deliverable. We also store the duration of your video, which we use to calculate price.

Order and payment records.Order status history, the tape format and video standard used, and identifiers Stripe issues for your payment (a Stripe customer ID, payment intent ID, and payment method reference). We do not receive or store your full card number. That's handled entirely by Stripe; see Section 4.

Account and session data.If you sign in to view an order, we store a session record tied to your account, including the session's expiry, and the IP address and browser user-agent string associated with that sign-in, so we can recognize and secure the session.

Technical data used for abuse prevention. When you call our upload, checkout, or related endpoints, we briefly track your IP address in memory to enforce rate limits (see Section 3). This is not written to our database or retained as a persistent log.

Communications. Transactional emails we send you (magic sign-in links, payment hold notices) are sent via our email provider.

• To operate the Service: process your order through the physical tape conversion pipeline, generate your preview and deliverable, and give you a way to review, approve, or decline the result.
• To process payment: place, capture, release, or re-authorize the Stripe hold associated with your order.
• To authenticate you: issue and verify magic sign-in links so that only the email address tied to an order can view or act on it.
• To prevent abuse: rate-limit upload, checkout, and worker registration requests by IP address; bind the video duration declared at upload time to a server-issued token that checkout must reference, so duration (and therefore price) can't be misreported after the fact; and enforce that only an order's owning customer can approve or decline it.
• To send you order-related and transactional communications.
• To troubleshoot and maintain the security of the Service.

We do not use your uploaded video content for advertising, and we do not sell your personal information.

We share information with the following service providers, only as needed to run the Service:

• Stripe: Processes and stores your payment details directly; we never see or store your full card number.
• Cloud storage and hosting providers: Store your uploaded video and generated files, host the application, and deliver transactional emails on our behalf.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own advertising or marketing purposes. We may disclose information if required by law or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Helical or others.

We use a session cookie to keep you signed in after you click a magic sign-in link, and equivalent session handling for admin accounts. These are functional cookies necessary for the Service to work; we do not currently use third-party advertising or analytics cookies.

We retain your order records for as long as needed to provide the Service, but your uploaded video and the files generated from it are deleted from our storage automatically, on the following schedule:

• Your uploaded source videois deleted within roughly 3-10 days of your order reaching a final outcome (delivered, declined, or failed), once it's no longer needed for the physical tape conversion. Failed orders get the longer end of that window, since they can occasionally be retried before we give up on them.
• Preview, thumbnail, and full-quality deliverable filesare deleted about 30 days after delivery, matching the download link's expiry. For orders that are declined or fail before delivery, any preview or thumbnail already generated is deleted on the same short schedule as the source video above.

If you'd like your content or account data deleted sooner, contact us using the details in Section 11 and we'll handle it manually.

You can ask us to access, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you, or to stop processing an order, by contacting [email protected]. Because this is a manual process today rather than a self-service tool, please include the order ID or email address associated with your account so we can locate your data.

Customer accounts use passwordless (magic-link) sign-in rather than a stored password. Administrative accounts use hashed passwords. Machine credentials used by our tape-deck operator software are stored as one-way hashes, not in plaintext, and are shown to the operator only once at creation. File transfers use short-lived, purpose-scoped presigned URLs rather than broadly shared storage credentials. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.

The Service is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 (or the applicable age of digital consent in your jurisdiction). If you believe a child has provided us information, contact [email protected]and we'll remove it.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by an updated “Last updated” date on this page.

Questions about this Privacy Policy, or requests regarding your data, can be sent to [email protected].