Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size.
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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 why are people still even using chrome ffs
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@atoponce Which OS? Chrome under Linux affected?
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@pvdrijst @Linux @atoponce @Vivaldi
That a feature is mentioned in that list does not mean it is enabled, it just means the code exists (and it is too difficult to actually disable this at compile-time, that requires too many patches). In fact, the feature the whole download depends on (OptimizationGuide) is disabled in Vivaldi and have been for a while, and I recently disabled the PromptApi features to be on the safe side. In addition, for a while what I suspect is the download URL for the model files being discussed has been pointed at a server that only return 404 responses . in case it should somehow be loaded.
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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)
@civodul if that argument holds then Guix should stop downloading 50Gb per machine per annum
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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.
I'm assuming that uninstall Chrome and delete its directory also works, because that's what I did.
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@civodul if that argument holds then Guix should stop downloading 50Gb per machine per annum
@pjotrprins Well, note that it does so at the user’s request.
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@msbellows I believe the toggle is chrome://settings/system "On-device AI".
I can't confirm this though, as in my testing on Linux, I haven't been able to locate the "weights.bin" download and no directory size supports that 4 GB download.
So either I haven't waited long enough to download it (it's been over an hour at this point), or it's not applicable to Linux.
@atoponce @msbellows @atoponce @msbellows It's showed up in my chrome profile. I am on ZFS so that might be why it worked. But it came down on April 27th. See https://mastodon.social/@grimmy/116530169590371195 for more info.
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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 In my time we called something like this a "trojan".
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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 google is evil. Not at Level as Facebook/meta. On Par with Microsoft, maybe.
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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
“never be evil”, they once wrote. Power corrupts. -
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