Reading your account online.

What the account adds

Nothing you need to measure or diagnose. The agent does all of that with no account at all, and will keep doing it if you never create one. What an account adds is history across devices, a way to publish a report as a link, and the ability to share a line with a provider.

Nothing syncs until a credential is stored on the agent, and nothing is shared with anyone until you switch sharing on for a specific link. Those are two separate switches on purpose: being linked to an ISP shares nothing by itself.

Your connection

The same question the desktop answers, aggregated across every device you have running rather than just the machine in front of you.

• Latency, slow tail, jitter, loss, worst run — the five figures that decide quality, each with the sample behind it. Loss shows both the rate and the counts it came from.
• Good for, right now — calls, gaming and streaming as a word, a number and a colour together, never colour alone.

One deliberate difference from the app: the console does not apply the bufferbloat penalty, because there is no meaningful average of a loaded-latency test across a whole account. The panel says so on its face rather than letting two surfaces quietly disagree about one line.

How your line compares

Your median latency to common destinations beside the median for your country and for everyone running Helix — with the number of contributing subscribers next to each figure.

“Not enough data yet” is a real answer. Below a minimum number of distinct contributors a cell is absent rather than shown with a small sample or anonymised, because a rating built from two people is not a rating of a network. Withheld cells are counted rather than hidden, so you can tell “nobody on this ISP uses Helix” from “something is broken”.

These are other Helix subscribers, not a survey and not a representative sample of the country — the page says so where it shows the figures.

Devices

Every agent reporting into your account, when each was last seen, and which connection each is measuring. Removing a device stops it uploading; it does not stop it measuring locally.

Reports and public links

A diagnosis saved on the desktop can be uploaded to your account. From the console you can publish it as a link to send to a support desk.

Uploading and publishing are different acts. Uploading is private and undoable. Publishing mints a public URL, so it is only ever done by you, signed in, from here — never by the agent on your PC. A published link can be revoked, and once revoked it answers exactly the same way as a link that never existed.

The page carries no tracking and is not indexed by search engines.

Speed-test history

Every speed test your agents have run, kept rather than overwritten. Sharing one freezes the result into the shared copy rather than pointing at live data, so a link somebody was sent keeps showing what was sent. It names your ISP, because that is the point of sharing a result, and nothing else about your account.

ISP links and sharing

The most important screen in the console, and worth reading slowly.

• A link records that a provider is associated with one of your connections. On its own it shares nothing.
• Sharing is a separate switch, per link. On, the provider’s support desk can see that line’s quality history — latency, loss counts, outages, path traces.
• Never shared, in any state: which applications used the network, which sites you visited, or anything about your traffic’s content. That data is not collected for sharing, so there is nothing to leak.
• Revocation bites on the next query. Nothing is cached on their side; the next thing they ask returns nothing. There is no stale copy to expire.

When a provider asks

A provider can assert that a service ID belongs to you, which arrives as a claim — through their channel, on their invoice or SMS, because Helix holds no contact list for other companies’ customers.

A claim grants nothing. It is one half of an assertion. Only your acceptance creates the link, and accepting asks you to pick which of your lines is theirs, because that choice is the scope of what they can see.

The screen shows the organisation’s registered and trading names and their published support contacts specifically so you can check out-of-band before accepting. If a claim surprises you, verify through a number you already had — never through one in the message that surprised you. Declining tells the provider the code was used and declined, and nothing about you.

Tickets

A support conversation with a provider you are linked to, where evidence can be attached rather than described.

An attached report is frozen and redacted at the moment you attach it, not linked live. It cannot break later when you revoke sharing, and it cannot become a back door into current data. If a provider escalates to their own upstream carrier, that carrier sees only the artefacts attached to that ticket — never your account, and never a stable identifier that would let them join your tickets into a history.

Retention and tiers

Tiers decide how far back you can read, not how long data is kept. The stored window is the largest tier’s, for everyone. Upgrading therefore reveals history that was there all along rather than starting a new recording — and downgrading does not delete anything.

Leaving

Deleting your account removes the row rather than flagging it hidden, and takes the measurements with it. Read-time filtering would leave your identity in the database for any export or debugging endpoint to surface; deletion does not.

Terms defined in the glossary. For the app itself, see reading the desktop app. What is collected and what is not is set out on the privacy page.