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.
  • Pycorax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    43·
    2 days ago

    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.

      • Pycorax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        I didn’t write my comment to disagree with your point or to make a bad faith argument. I merely wanted to point out another thing that is of greater concern to me and most likely many others. That is in no way mutually exclusive to your point and doesn’t invalidate it. So get that snark out of here.

        I frankly don’t think the amount of “trees being burnt” from posting a comment is relevant compared to the potential of hundreds of devices performing a unnecessary download. Hell, a billionaire’s carbon footprint in a couple seconds likely already far exceeds that. At least this conversation is going somewhere. In any case, this is an unquantifiable cost anyways.