Y’all remember a couple weeks ago when I shared Privacy Guy’s article about #Anthropic being sketchy?
#Google said, Hold my beer, and dropped a 4 gig #ai weights file on every #chrome user. You can’t delete it, it reinstalls unless you can wizard your way through some obscure settings. And, the browser doesn’t use it, it ships queries to google cloud. It exists only so they can say it’s “local”.
“An engineering team at a large AI vendor decided that the user's machine is a deployment surface to be optimised for the vendor's product roadmap, not a personal device whose owner is the legal authority on what runs there.
The Anthropic case put a pre-authorisation for browser automation on around three million Claude Desktop user devices [19]. The Google case puts 4 GB of AI
... Show more...Y’all remember a couple weeks ago when I shared Privacy Guy’s article about #Anthropic being sketchy?
#Google said, Hold my beer, and dropped a 4 gig #ai weights file on every #chrome user. You can’t delete it, it reinstalls unless you can wizard your way through some obscure settings. And, the browser doesn’t use it, it ships queries to google cloud. It exists only so they can say it’s “local”.
“An engineering team at a large AI vendor decided that the user's machine is a deployment surface to be optimised for the vendor's product roadmap, not a personal device whose owner is the legal authority on what runs there.
The Anthropic case put a pre-authorisation for browser automation on around three million Claude Desktop user devices [19]. The Google case puts 4 GB of AI weights on, by my mid-band estimate, around 500 million Chrome user devices, with proportionally larger ePrivacy, GDPR, and environmental exposure.”
thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome…

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.
Alexander Hanff (That Privacy Guy! — Hanff & Co. AB)