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.
    • Jack@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      The linked page accesses at least 10 other sites for scripts, and is more than 2 MB big. It could have been a 458 byte page:

      Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:

      1. Backup registry
      2. Start
      3. regedit
      4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
      5. right-click Policies, New, Key
      6. confirm Google, Enter
      7. right-click Google, New, Key
      8. confirm Chrome, Enter
      9. right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
      10. confirm GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings, Enter
      11. right-click newly created key, Modify
      12. set value to 1
      13. OK
      14. Restart computer.