Privacy policy

The short version

OSRS Helper does not require an account and does not ask for personal information. You can use every page on this site without telling us anything about yourself.

We use Google Analytics, and it only runs if you agree to it. Decline and no analytics cookie is set — every page works exactly the same either way. Nothing here is behind a signup.

This site does show advertising. Ads are served by Google AdSense, and unlike analytics the ad script loads on every page for every visitor, without waiting for you to choose. It sets its own cookies when it loads. See advertising below for what that means and how to stop it.

What we collect

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand which pages are useful and which are not. It records which pages are visited, roughly where visitors come from at a country level, which referrer sent them, and which product actions occur — a search performed, a calculator used.

It only runs with your consent. Until you accept, Google Analytics is loaded in a mode that stores nothing on your device. If you accept, it sets a cookie that recognises your browser on future visits, so returning readers are not counted as new ones.

We never send Google anything you type. A search records that a search happened and how many results came back, not the words you searched for, because a search box is the one place people accidentally type things about themselves.

Google is the data processor for this and processes it on servers that may be outside the UK. The advertising features of Google Analytics specifically are turned off: advertising storage, ad personalisation and ad user data are all disabled, so your analytics data is not used to target ads at you. IP addresses are anonymised. This is separate from the ad script described below, which is its own product with its own cookies.

You can change your mind at any time, and withdrawing is as easy as agreeing was:

Declining also stops the cookie being set at all. If you have already accepted and then withdraw, you may wish to clear cookies for this site to remove what was set in the meantime.

Server logs

Like any website, our hosting records standard request logs — IP address, timestamp, page requested, user agent — for security and diagnostics. These are retained for a limited period and are not used to identify individuals.

Local storage

Some features may store preferences in your browser’s local storage — a favourited item, for instance. This data stays on your device, is not transmitted to us, and can be cleared through your browser at any time.

What we do not collect

• We do not ask for or store your RuneScape username, email address or password.
• We will never ask for your Jagex account credentials. Nobody legitimate ever will.
• We do not sell data to anyone.

Third parties

We fetch Grand Exchange price data and item images from the RuneScape Wiki. Those requests are made by our servers, not by your browser, so browsing this site does not expose your details to them. See data sources for detail.

Advertising

This site carries ads served by Google AdSense. We do not choose the individual ads and we do not receive anything about you from Google in return — the arrangement is that Google fills the space and we are paid for it.

The ad script loads on every page for every visitor, regardless of any choice you make in the cookie banner. That banner governs analytics only.

It does not follow that ads are tracking you, and we would rather be accurate than dramatic in either direction. The site tells Google before the ad script runs that advertising storage, ad personalisation and ad user data are all denied, and it never lifts that. In that mode Google serves non-personalised ads: chosen from the page you are on rather than from a profile of you, and without setting advertising cookies. We checked rather than assumed — a clean first visit with the ad script fully loaded leaves no advertising cookie on the device.

What Google still receives is the request itself: your IP address, user agent and the page the ad appeared on, which is unavoidable for any third party that serves a file to your browser. Google acts as its own data controller for that, not as our processor, so it is governed by Google’s policy for partner sites, which we have no control over or visibility into.

If you would rather it did not load at all, the effective controls are a content blocker or a browser that blocks third-party requests. Declining in our banner will not stop the script loading, and we are not going to imply that it will.

Embedded video

Some guides include a YouTube video. These are shown as a still image and a play button, and nothing is requested from YouTube or Google until you press play. The still image is stored on and served from this site rather than loaded from YouTube’s image servers, specifically so that viewing a page with a video on it does not tell Google you were here. If you never press play, YouTube receives nothing about your visit.

When you do press play, the player loads from youtube-nocookie.com, which is Google’s reduced-tracking embed domain. At that point Google’s own privacy policy applies to the playback, and we have no control over or visibility into what they collect.

Links to external sites are marked and open in a new tab. Once you follow one, that site’s privacy policy applies rather than ours.

Children

This site is a game resource with no age-restricted content and collects no personal data from anyone, including children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the reviewed date at the top of this page will change with it. If a change is significant — new data collection, a new third party — we will say what changed rather than quietly updating the text.

Contact

Questions about privacy can be sent through the contact page.