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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/browsers@programming.dev
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Cross-Posted, via Technology Community.

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.

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[–] 8 points 6 months ago*

"...without consent."

Reminder: Chrome is a closed-source, proprietary browser. It has been able to do anything it wants without your consent since it was created.

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