Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB Gemini Nano AI model on your device

[tutanota@mastodon.social]

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB Gemini Nano AI model on your device

No consent
No opt-in
No real opt-out for regular users

This isn’t a small experiment & it’s on billions of devices.

️ Read more: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/

A tactic we've already seen with Gemini on Android. But at least you can disable it here, learn how: https://tuta.com/blog/how-to-disable-gemini-on-android

[oatrapado@mastodon.social]

@Tutanota time to uninstall chrome xD

[gokushrm@mastodon.social]

@Tutanota there is no Google in our device

[htpcnz@mastodon.social]

@Tutanota ha ha ha ha while everyone is too busy chasing the new clippy copilot, captain Gemini is taking over in the background.

[the_universality@mastodon.novotnykrystof.com]

@Tutanota Damn. The RAM crisis forced Google to regular computers and laptops to get more RAM.

On the serious note, it isn't that surprising.

[n_dimension@infosec.exchange]

@Tutanota

...wow... That's super disingenious take.
Pushing data is now the major contributor of climate collapse?

A single backbone does about 24Tbits per second and the world is a spaghetti of these.
A 4GB blob pushed to few tens of millions devices wouldn't even twitch the needle.

The author is either naive or relies on the naivete of their readers.

[lumi@snug.moe]

@Tutanota could i ask to have a look at our request to ban generative "ai" in all tutanota projects?

github.com/tutao/tutanota/discussions/10759

[dckim@mastodon.social]

@Tutanota I really like the Gemini AI model. I have been using it from the google website, and it seems like it is miles ahead of all others.

This is likely because Google has the largest Data Set of all. The other companies on have a small fraction of the Dataset that Google has, and likewise only fractional access to additional data through scraping/polls

[leberschnitzel@existiert.ch]

@n_dimension you mean like at 2/3rds through the article? @Tutanota

[c0dec0dec0de@hachyderm.io]

@Tutanota there’s something obscene about using the nano prefix on something so large.

[n_dimension@infosec.exchange]

@leberschnitzel @Tutanota

Didn't get past the clickbite title, but now I'll have a look...

[mokhtarstork@zirk.us]

@Tutanota Time to change to Linux

[lbroggi@livellosegreto.it]

@Tutanota For those who wonder about the CO2 cost, here is a direct quote

At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. That is the environmental cost of one company unilaterally deciding that two billion peoples' default browser will mass-distribute a 4 GB binary they did not request.

[chantology@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Tutanota

[jetmcquack@mastodon.uno]

@Tutanota

[blindcoder@toot.berlin]

@Tutanota It's not a "can" or "can not" situation. It's a "Google allows you to do that" situation.

[lemgandi@mastodon.social]

@Tutanota Don't be Evil

[feyter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Tutanota but how is this model expected to run on my crappy hardware?

[locha@fediscience.org]

@Tutanota Scratching my head: say we assume the best intents, is it better or worse than sending those requests to external server? Silent bloat or spyware?

[mast0d0nphan@beige.party]

@The_Universality @Tutanota They want to crash all local devices so they can sell us AI-slop cloud laptops that we don't control.

Google's new motto: YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY! ALSO WE'RE TOTALLY EVIL!