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.
  • kureta@lemmy.ml
    7·
    9 hours ago

    You have likely been using “local AI” or machine learning on your laptop battery for quite some time without being explicitly aware of it.

    But to be upset about this specific instance seems arbitrary to me.

    I am upset because I am aware of this one. How can I be upset about something I am not even aware of?

    why would Chrome need additional consent to download/update one of many external components?

    The user should be informed about what they are getting. By that logic Chrome csn also install and run a crypto miner.