A company in Europe is selling "your private AI machine." We read the whole offer, including the privacy policy — that's where these things keep their meaning.
There is no machine. What you get is a rented virtual machine: a slice of someone else's computer in a data center in Finland, running on hardware rented from other companies, with your account records kept on a third company's cloud. The smallest machine on their business plan holds 512 megabytes of memory — less than a cheap phone. Your life with it runs on daily credits, and their site says plainly that when the credits run out, the AI pauses.
And the privacy? Their own policy says the record of what you asked and what it answered is kept for thirty days — including after you delete the conversation, the machine, and your account. Copies in their backups outlive the deletion too.
We're not writing this to be cruel. We're writing it because the word private is doing all the work in that pitch, and it can't carry the load. Privacy is not a data center with better manners. Privacy is who owns the machine.
Helena runs on yours. The free version is yours outright — installed, owned, and it works with the internet cable pulled. Our hosted work runs on hardware we own ourselves, keeps nothing from any job, and trains on nothing. When you log out, she's gone — scrubbed, not archived.
That's the whole difference, and it isn't a feature list. It's the shape.
— Harrison Interactive