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
    52·
    2 hours 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

    • filt@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      3·
      9 minutes ago

      Re-read the article. It’s not remotely like Firefox.

      The point is that Chrome without any authorization from the user, nor notification to the user, is going to utilize 4GB worth of bandwidth as well as disk space. It is dishonest and a bad practice.

      You can’t turn it off in settings, you have to set flags to turn it off. This disqualifies normal everyday users from knowing how or why this is happening.

      Your comments are disingenuous and seems like you’re just here to be a Google and “AI” apologist.

      This behavior by Google is gross, and any company or person that thinks it’s acceptable is equally gross. The author thoughtfully cites pieces of the GDPR and other acceptable computing policies and laws which this behavior contravenes. They also discuss the environmental impacts of this behavior.