Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

thatprivacyguy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#291

Post by Waterluvian »

jacquesm wrote: post #17
fsflover wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how it works on Debian. Can recommend.

Guess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don't understand consent.

I think they do. They just don’t care. We’re the fleetingly small percentage of nerds in the corner who will notice and complain. Were useful to them for other reasons but we’re not really the concern here.

It’s probably a business misplay to tell the other 99% of users about something they weren’t going to think about. But if by chance it goes awry and there’s outcry, just apologize and commit to do better.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#292

Post by eastbound »

heavyset_go wrote: post #83
CalRobert wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I'm joking.

They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online. It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.

If Mozilla fired its CEO for a private political donation from 10 years earlier, it will not hesitate to do much worse to its users. Mozilla isn’t on the good side here.

He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#293

Post by tgv »

avazhi wrote: post #247
heavyset_go wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online. It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.

I’ve been using Firefox for 20+ years and continue to do so, but let’s not pretend that Firefox hasn’t been an embarrassing shit show for most of the past 15.

Ok, then. What shitshow? Does it not pale in comparison to Chrome and Edge?

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#294

Post by notabotiswear »

jeroenhd wrote: post #160
CalRobert wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea but when I mention Firefox my colleagues under 35 or so literally think I'm joking.

When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech. When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead. As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have litt…

I, being a Firefox user with practically zero Chromium use, would air my grievances when the Mozilla does something I disagree with more than I would when Google does. And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.

You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#295

Post by RaiausderDose »

tobylane wrote: post #62
scriptsmith wrote: post #31

If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (one-time) download of the ~2.7 GiB CPU or ~4.0 GiB GPU model using LanguageModel.create() https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api Wh…

Those two (and more) exist in chrome://flags in Chrome 147. I'm disabling them now, with the expectation that will prevent the new default. One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?

I'm on Chrome 147 too and disabled:

"optimization-guide-on-device-model"

- Enables optimization guide on device

"prompt-api-for-gemini-nano"

- Prompt API for Gemini Nano

- Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input

and deleted weights.bin and the 2025.x folder in "OptGuideOnDeviceModel"

Will report if Chrome 148 downloads the model again.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#296

Post by seszett »

DarkUranium wrote: post #252
heavyset_go wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online. It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.

I mean ... frankly, and I say this as a guy who's used solely Firefox since before it was Firefox all the way until 2025 when I finally got sick & tired of their shit... (now on WaterFox because I refuse to submit to the Google browser monopoly) ... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.

I still don't understand what problem you guys have with Firefox. I really don't, and comments like yours are always very vague and seem to assume that it's obvious.

For me Firefox is (slightly) better than is used to be, not by a wide margin but it's not gotten worse either.

I've been running it since it was Phoenix so I think my experience is at least somewhat valid, which is why I'm so confused by these comments.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#297

Post by kasabali »

> The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.

God, I'm SICK of this AI slop style. After ingesting terabytes of pirated books you'd expect a little bit more variety in it's writing.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#298

Post by pipe2devnull »

dist-epoch wrote: post #285
z3t4 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auto update is basically a root backdoor, it's especially troublesome when you are not the customer, you are the product!

Yes, which is why I use paid-for OSes and browsers, instead of free ones like Linux or Firefox. I don't want to be the product.

I think with Windows you probably are the customer and the product

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#299

Post by elashri »

tomhow wrote: post #225
imcritic wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We've banned this account.

Hi Tom, since you are here. It seems that my comment, the GOP is flagged and I think this is a case of flag abuse. Can you help with that?

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#300

Post by glenstein »

hacker_homie wrote: post #109
Sharlin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What mess? I only ever used Chrome as my main browser for a short while when Firefox had become rather bloaty and had slow JS, and Chrome was small and nimble. But that was something like fifteen years ago. Firefox works, is plenty fast these days, and only eats most of my RAM compared to Chrome which takes all of it, and serves me a web devoid of almost all ads and most trackers.

From a funding standpoint there’s no future to Firefox. They will get brought Mozilla foundation is an investment fund now. Firefox it dead weight.

They push millions of lines of code every quarter including thousands of patches, constant security updates and performance improvements and deepened support for web platform standards. As open source projects go, it's probably one of the most active and thriving ones there is. As eager as some people are to dance on Mozilla's grave, that day isn't coming anytime soon.

If you wanted to point to the year where they've been the best financed they've ever been and where they've had the most resources invested into browser development they ever have, that year would be 2026. Only to be exceeded by 2027 and then 2028, 2029 and beyond.

At a bare minimum, their endowment gives them probably a two to three year firewall in the event that their funding is cut off, which it hasn't been. I also thought the accusation was supposed to be the other way around, namely that we all knew they were going to get funded into perpetuity as controlled opposition.

Post reply on HN