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.
  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    42·
    2 hours ago

    It’s funny because they’re trying to find ways to cut cloud costs by offloading to users, but when that’s not a concern, they shove everything into the cloud and then ensure no local running option is available or viable.