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

thatprivacyguy.com

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

#771

Post by userbinator »

Not too long ago, someone submitted an AI demo to HN that resulted in a 3.1GB download upon visiting the page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823460

It reminds me of the "dialup warnings" common 2 decades ago on huge pages (often containing many images). Yes, bandwidth and storage has gotten cheaper, but the unwanted waste should still be called out. I'm not even anti-AI, having waited several hours recently to get some local models to experiment with, but that's because I wanted to and made the decision to use that bandwidth.

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

#772

Post by gessha »

crazygringo wrote: post #560

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of disk space or bandwidth to use, but that's just a reasonable practic…

News from the year 2030: Google takes your credit card info, sells it on the black market for pennies and kicks you in the groin.

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Google stole your credit card info without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it.

Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of physical abuse to use, but that's just a reasonable practical discussion to have. Framing it around consent is unnecessarily inflammatory and makes it harder to have a discussion, not easier.

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

#773

Post by _karie_ »

exabrial wrote: post #768
crazygringo wrote: post #560

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of disk space or bandwidth to use, but that's just a reasonable practic…

please don't defend this anymore. People installed an html client, not a backdoor into their computer.

Incorrect. Adding LLMs in the browser IS the backdoor into your computer.

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

#774

Post by mr_toad »

azangru wrote: post #362
dotcoma wrote: post #10

Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?

> Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world? There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.

> Blink is the most featureful

It’s not a waste of bandwidth and disk space, it’s a feature!

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

#775

Post by userbinator »

davb wrote: post #679

An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again. As much as I’m against unexpected 4G…

Conspiracy theory: making the browser bigger makes it harder to run large quantities of headless versions, for all the useful (but anti-Google) things that enables. I suspect this is directly tied to the ongoing ascent of verification laws and other pieces of the drive towards authoritarian dystopia. They're basically DDoS'ing providers of browser-VM services with this.

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

#776

Post by heavyset_go »

eastbound wrote: post #292
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.

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.

This just makes me support Firefox more

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

#777

Post by wavemode »

gessha wrote: post #772
crazygringo wrote: post #560

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of disk space or bandwidth to use, but that's just a reasonable practic…

News from the year 2030: Google takes your credit card info, sells it on the black market for pennies and kicks you in the groin. Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Google stole your credit card info without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. Now we can argue whether or not…

You're arguing in bad faith.

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

#778

Post by mr_toad »

Spooky23 wrote: post #608

Chrome also silently installs a powerful relational database engine without warning or consent. All of your history, trivially searchable. Imagine the waste heat generated by the browser bar conducting thousands of non-consensual searches every time you type.

SQLite is around 1MB or less. This download is four thousand times larger.

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

#779

Post by fluoridation »

ben_w wrote: post #515
jazzypants wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same guy who said that Claude Code was spyware because it makes a few Windows Registry keys [0]. I find it really hard to take him seriously. [0] https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

Oh, one of those people. Gotcha. Back in the early days of my career (can't remember exactly, possibly 2010?) I tried making screensavers and gave them away on my website, someone followed me directly on twitter then tweeted to everyone that my screensavers were some kind of malware because… I'd named the main class as per the tutorial and somehow this looked scary.

Main class? Tutorial? I feel like you're leaving out important details.

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

#780

Post by detourdog »

fastball wrote: post #642
jchw wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of. Reminds me a bit of back when installing software was a minefield due to all of the integrated "promotions" for things like toolbars, only now they've vertically integrated the unwanted software, cutting out the middleman. Honestly, for most features you could justifiably say its fine. I mean honestly, how large is an Englis…

You could say the same thing about shipping V8 with Chrome. Some users disable JS so shipping V8 with Chrome is additional software they didn't ask for.

The old unix administrator would expect a platform to ship choice of JS that would be in /usr/bin/JS. The local administrator would add their local choice of JS /usr/local/bin/V8.

The browser would then have a configuration option of which JS interpreter to use.

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