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.
  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    41·
    56 minutes ago

    It’s a really weird article. They’re trying to say that some sleazy thing Anthropic did is the same as Google Chrome having an on-device machine learning model? And making it seem extra nefarious that the file gets redownloaded when you delete it, which seems like a completely normal self-healing mechanism. And finally mentions that you can just turn it off in the AI section of the Chrome settings.

    They could have just written an article about how Chrome is now 4 GB larger if you have AI stuff turned on.

    Firefox has the exact same thing

    And for machine translation