Aaron Toponce ⚛️5d ago

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.

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

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!
Show threadferricoxide5d ago

@atoponce

On the plus side, looks like it's smaller on Linux:

find ~ \ -type f \ -name "weights.bin" 2> /dev/null | \ xargs stat -c '%s' | \ awk '{ sum += $1 } END { printf "%.2f GiB\n", sum / (1024^3) }' 2.67 GiB

Show threadAaron Toponce ⚛️5d ago
@ferricoxide I still haven't seen it show up in my home dir. What's the directory path for you?
Show threadferricoxide5d ago

@atoponce

${HOME}/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/2025.8.21.1028/weights.bin

Show threadAaron Toponce ⚛️5d ago

@ferricoxide Thanks. It appears to be ~/.var/app/com.google.Chrome/config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/ for me as I have it installed via Flatpak, but the weights.bin file hasn't showed up yet.

I wonder if Flatpak is getting in the way here, or if it's getting installed somewhere else.

Show threadferricoxide5d ago
@atoponce

No clue. I only looked in ~ because the only other locations my user would be able to write to would be /tmp or /var/tmp (which would be a bad place for Chrome to try to write to since those tend to be smaller partitions than /home normally is (whether /home is a standalone partition or part of `/)
Show threadTom Tom
@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.
May 5 at 5:46pmWeb
Show threadferricoxide5d ago
@tomtom @atoponce

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).