Dennis
Karl AuerbachYikes! Google is far past its "do no evil" era.
I really object to the amount of crapware that is auto-loaded onto our machines - it is as if we don't own the computers, but Google, Microsoft, and Apple do.
"Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane."
(BTW, I mostly use Linux and FreeBsd, although I use MacOS frequently. I try to avoid using Chrome - I mostly use Firefox, but even that is getting awful.)
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.
`Da Elf