F’ everything Google ! Owners and workers alike, scum people…
Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent — That Privacy Guy!
Submitted 1 week ago by byzxor@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/
Comments
Sims@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Mothra@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Yup it’s exactly as the headline says once you read the article. No clickbait. Also is a thorough and readable post, long but easy to understand even for someone who isn’t very tech savvy such as myself.
I guess I have to figure out how to uninstall that now
gianni@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Beyond the disk size, what’s wrong with this? Isn’t local machine learning better than shipping your data off to some cloud provider? Or is the problem machine learning?
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Isn’t local machine learning better than shipping your data off to some cloud provider?
They’re absolutely shipping all your local data up to their cloud.
gianni@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
It’s likely (and one of the reasons I don’t use Chrome) but its not the discussion we’re having.
kureta@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
The problem, mostly, is that it is installed without informing the user or asking for content and it reinstalls even if you delete it, which is what a malware does. I may not want a local AI work on my laptop on battery while I am working and browsing the internet.
gianni@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
To me this seems arbitrary—Chrome contains countless other binary blobs which you have no insight to and cannot consent to. They are part of the application. Chrome contains other machine learning algorithms and features and has for years, but these have been baked-in. You have likely been using “local AI” or machine learning on your laptop battery for quite some time without being explicitly aware of it.
If people don’t like these features that’s fine, there are lots of alternatives to choose from (personally, I use Helium). But to be upset about this specific instance seems arbitrary to me. And to claim that it’s somehow nefarious (i.e. the consent part) seems disingenuous. Consent is granted when the user downloads and begins using Chrome—why would Chrome need additional consent to download/update one of many external components?
Again, I don’t use Chrome and I’m not interested in this feature, I just don’t see how it’s necessarily bad or evil all things considered.
Mothra@mander.xyz 1 week ago
If you read the article it will summarize very succinctly everything wrong with it. It is illegal for a variety of reasons in some places (Europe, California) it’s wasteful, it means 4 fucking GB of data unrequested which can be a problem in metered connections in many places. 4GB. This model is not essential for chrome to function as a browser at all, and in all likelihood unless you use it for generating text then you probably are not even using it.
deliriousdreams@fedia.io 1 week ago
Per Passerby6497's comment above:
The AI Mode pill in the Chrome 147 omnibox is a cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface - every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google's servers for processing by Google's hosted models. The on-device Nano model is not invoked by the AI Mode UI flow at all. They are entirely separate code paths - the most visible AI affordance in the browser does not use the local model the user has been silently given, and the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.
What a double kick to the dick. First, they silently download 4gb to your disk, and they still fucking send your shit to their cloud AI.
laz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Try supermium
Brad@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Here’s the link from that article that explains how to disable and remove it, since the text of the article doesn’t include it.
pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download…
Jack@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I am pretty sure that the main way how how to remove it is to uninstall chrome, but i also think that if you cared, you wouldn’t be using chrome in the first place