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.
Yeah, even there. A page loading is one thing, but browser features are somewhat independent of the content. There’s also a good chance this is being used as a hook for other Google products like Drive or Docs (which are basically websites under the hood) to allow offline file management, creation, etc.
It’s a bad choice, but it wouldn’t be the first bad choice Google has made.
Yeah, even there. A page loading is one thing, but browser features are somewhat independent of the content. There’s also a good chance this is being used as a hook for other Google products like Drive or Docs (which are basically websites under the hood) to allow offline file management, creation, etc.
It’s a bad choice, but it wouldn’t be the first bad choice Google has made.