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.
Remember when people used to go insane in newsgroups screaming bloat if a program update was 80 KB bigger than the previous version and now people do not notice an extra 4 GB.
Remember when people used to go insane in newsgroups screaming bloat if a program update was 80 KB bigger than the previous version and now people do not notice an extra 4 GB.