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.
It was bound to happen, since they started testing it more than a year ago. While I really hate this decision, I hate the linked blog more. It’s populist SEO slop that exists to advertise “that privacy guy”'s consultancy services. Measuring environment impact of the downloads, that’s your chosen angle here? Bleh.
https://news.aibase.com/news/25955 https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#model_download
It was bound to happen, since they started testing it more than a year ago. While I really hate this decision, I hate the linked blog more. It’s populist SEO slop that exists to advertise “that privacy guy”'s consultancy services. Measuring environment impact of the downloads, that’s your chosen angle here? Bleh.