Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size.
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@atoponce not enough people know about Chromium, which Google were forced to create through anti-monopoly pressure
Chromium: non-creepy chrome
https://download-chromium.appspot.comDont listen to googles discouragment: works fine, you choose whether you update it and it doesn't pressure you to use a google account
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@ferricoxide @atoponce what's the point of using Chrome ? I mean if I use Microsoft I will get a lot shit from Microsoft... No surprise there.
@tomtom@pouet.chapril.org @atoponce@fosstodon.org
If it weren't for the horribleness that is the #AWS #FleetManager to access #Windows EC2s via RDP(ish), I wouldn't use Chrome. However, AWS decided that FleetManager should be horrible to use with non #Chromium browsers (or maybe AWS just hates #Firefox). -
Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce I've no choice but to use Chrome for work on my self-supplied PC, but I'm currently trying:
- Delete weights.bin
- Create an empty file with the same name
- Set its file attributes to read-only, and system to hopefully make it impossible for Google's weights file to replace it when Chrome tries to redownload it.Fingers crossed. If that doesn't work, I'll see if the hidden attribute works any better than the system attribute.
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@atoponce I've no choice but to use Chrome for work on my self-supplied PC, but I'm currently trying:
- Delete weights.bin
- Create an empty file with the same name
- Set its file attributes to read-only, and system to hopefully make it impossible for Google's weights file to replace it when Chrome tries to redownload it.Fingers crossed. If that doesn't work, I'll see if the hidden attribute works any better than the system attribute.
@pauldrye It seems toggling chrome://settings/system -> On-device AI does the trick.
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Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
Another reason to use Vivaldi web browser.
It is the last mainstream web browser to not bundle an AI.
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@faduda A possible solution might be toggling chrome://settings/system -> On-device AI, although I haven't been able to confirm, as the 4 GB weights.bin file hasn't shown up on my install yet.
And no, this is strictly Google Chrome browser bloat. It doesn't affect Chromium, Edge, Brave, or any of the other Chromium forks as I understand it.
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@atoponce Seems like an easy fix.
"The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome's AI features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely "
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@atoponce A gigantic rant but no useful, actionable information. Just like the last time. I'm going to ignore this.
Who's gonna tell him that Microsoft installs silently Copilot on Windows PCs?
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Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce it's so easy to deactivate it - just uninstall Chrome! You all should have done it long time ago!
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Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce
> At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
this is just blind LLM outrage. Yes it's a waste of storage and network that nobody consented to. It's not guaranteed to make people use more CPU as they have to interact with whatever feature this is going to empower. But it's *only* 4GB.
Please write an article about the climate costs of internet ads. This is about a trillion times more wasteful and nobody consents to it. It wastes so much CPU and you could literally calculate the damage to batteries of mobile devices caused by this unwanted, unsolicited, uninvited compute. -
@rodneylives @mgorny @atoponce
I still have a backup phone like that
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Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce Is this news? It's over a year old. IIRC, it's designed to reduce the amount of data sent off-machine. They were talking about space consumption in Canary release in Feb of 2025 (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chrome-ai-dev-preview-discuss/c/PhgjQg4IoQk)
Looking for all the models that have been downloaded for cache in browser, it's not just limited to one. chrome://on-device-internals/
You can use the Tools tab to 'Load Default' model, then type your prompt in the box below. It's slower than a cloud-based response.
Ask 'how to spell "incorriggable" and it takes 2 seconds to spit out: The correct spelling is incorrigible.
Takes 10 more seconds to explain each part of the word.
Then it crashes.
I'd rather handle spell checks on-box than send every word up to a cloud service.
But, don't ask it what the range of radio delay is between the earth and the moon. Highest Quality says 2.5 milliseconds, and crashes. Fastest inference says 22 seconds, and crashes. Not usable.
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Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce Which OS? Chrome under Linux affected?
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@atoponce Which OS? Chrome under Linux affected?
@tbachner It's not for me which I installed via Flatpak. I've left Chrome running for the past few hours and executed:
% find / -type f -name weights.bin 2> /dev/random
a couple times, with no results.
However, @ferricoxide found it on their machine in ~/.config/google-chrome/
YMMV.
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@tbachner It's not for me which I installed via Flatpak. I've left Chrome running for the past few hours and executed:
% find / -type f -name weights.bin 2> /dev/random
a couple times, with no results.
However, @ferricoxide found it on their machine in ~/.config/google-chrome/
YMMV.
@atoponce@fosstodon.org @tbachner@ruhr.social
Yeah. I'm using an EL9 derivative (via WSL). Looks like I installed the portable installer (i.e., it lives under${HOME}/firefox/) rather than from RPM, though. A little odd for my habits, but I can't remember why I did it that way. -
Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce AI infra companies cannot seriously get away with pulling shit like this surely
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Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce question seems to be why? If the weights are sitting on your machine, but the ai functionality is still calling home... Is this some weird distributed AI alternative to building data centres? Using your users processing downtime to answer Gemini queries _elsewhere_?
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Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.
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!
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.
That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
@atoponce the heck .
