livligkinkajou@slrpnk.net to Enshittification@slrpnk.netEnglish · 17 days ago

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

www.thatprivacyguy.com

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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

www.thatprivacyguy.com

livligkinkajou@slrpnk.net to Enshittification@slrpnk.netEnglish · 17 days ago
15
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!
www.thatprivacyguy.com
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.

The article gives 3 options to avoid it:

The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome’s AI features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely

  1. It can probably be reverted at their whim at any time
  2. You probably don’t have access to it
  3. It is the most realistic option, just use another browser
  • perestroika@slrpnk.net
    5·
    17 days ago

    That’s pretty nice detective work.

    Now the lawyers can begin. If Google downloads a ton of stuff for users, some of them with limited disk space, some with metered data connectivity, Google is making their lives worse. If they automatically make the life of (for example) 100 million people worse, they should be fined for such behaviour. If this behaviour is occurring in Europe, then I predict that under the EU Digital Services Act, they will be fined eventually.