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.
Downloading 4 GB of data without your consent is a pretty big issue. If you’re on a bandwidth starved or data capped network, that becomes a huge problem. Wasting 4GB of space on this nonsense that users aren’t gonna use too is pretty absurd.
Downloading 4 GB of data without your consent is a pretty big issue. If you’re on a bandwidth starved or data capped network, that becomes a huge problem. Wasting 4GB of space on this nonsense that users aren’t gonna use too is pretty absurd.