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

781–790 of 1001 posts

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

#781

Post by llbbdd »

munk-a wrote: post #696
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…

If Rockstar games can be criticized for Hot Coffee then Chrome can absolutely be criticized for such bloat ware.

That was also stupid

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

#782

Post by _carbyau_ »

marcosdumay wrote: post #727
robot-wrangler wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone puts a camera and a microphone on devices that don't need them, then it's a) pushing up the price of goods for everyone with features that mainly serve corporate, b) there are bad actors out there even if you think corporate is a good one, c) no reason to think corporate is a good actor. Shipping an AI model with a browser is starting to look like sticking cameras on ALL glasses, not just smart glasses, re…

Shipping the model with the browser is exactly the opposite of what you are claiming. The alternative is sending the data to Google.

Back to the assumptions.

If the onboard LLM means no data sending and you get your own little service wholly subservient to you like a good little program. That's nice!

If the onboard LLM means better data filtering, possibly even exploration of the local system, to send information to Google while lessening their datacentre bills running LLM services. That seems a little underhanded to just bake into things without notification.

Pick your assumption, you get your outcome. What are your assumptions?

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

#783

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

I stopped using chrome 15 years ago and de-googled my life 5 years ago. The hardest thing to let go in fact was Gmaps (most alternatives, until recently, were not great) and I'm still captured by android, but rome was not built in a day.

Quitting chrome these days is the easiest thing to do. The writing is on the way. You don't control the browser on your network, google does. ANd for better or worse, google's priority is AI at this time.

Sysadmins should take notice.

If the network is ~65% chrome and thus deemed painful, take the gradual approach. Do not push chrome on new devices or users. Watch that problem slowly go away.

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

#784

Post by r-w »

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.

Bad analogy. "Some users disable it" is very different from "it was introduced without any notification or information about what it does and the vast majority of laypeople have negative sentiment toward it".

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

#785

Post by anigbrowl »

xp84 wrote: post #649
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…

> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bundle…

You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era.

Yes, that's the problem

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

#786

Post by phyzome »

taf2 wrote: post #730

What’s wrong with shipping a local llm? This is quite nice IMO is there a privacy concern with running it locally? I already have a few games I wrote web based using this and it’s quiet nice to not need a server to run my game in pure HTML from my file system

Because it's huge and people were counting on having that disk space.

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

#787

Post by phyzome »

marliechiller wrote: post #495
zarzavat wrote: post #492

There's simply no reason to be using Google Chrome in 2026. Purge it from your computer and install a less user hostile browser. Google Chrome just exists to make Google money at your expense, to sell your data and deplete your battery.

What do you suggest as alternatives? Currently I'm using firefox which seems ok but I know they are propped up by google somewhat

I mean, if your choices are "propped up somewhat by Google" and "literally run by literally Google"...

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

#788

Post by newman314 »

newsoftheday wrote: post #645

This is what I've done after spending some time to look into it, this is for Linux Desktop: Delete Chrome's silent 4 GB AI model file and AI In Chrome, go to: chrome://flags Search for and Disable these: Enables optimization guide on device Prompt API for Gemini Nano AI Mode Open DevTools (F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I). Click the Settings (gear icon). Go to AI Innovations and uncheck Enable AI assistance. For Linux, in a bash…

FWIW, first two sections worked for Chrome on Windows.

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

#789

Post by eclipticplane »

hashseed wrote: post #667
newsoftheday wrote: post #645

This is what I've done after spending some time to look into it, this is for Linux Desktop: Delete Chrome's silent 4 GB AI model file and AI In Chrome, go to: chrome://flags Search for and Disable these: Enables optimization guide on device Prompt API for Gemini Nano AI Mode Open DevTools (F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I). Click the Settings (gear icon). Go to AI Innovations and uncheck Enable AI assistance. For Linux, in a bash…

DevTools uses a server side model, and only after you opt in with explicit consent.

Or accidentally trigger it because you're using a key binding you've used for 15 years that, upon hitting an unexpected consent screen, triggers the consent button.

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

#790

Post by marklubi »

ddtaylor wrote: post #579
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…

The problem is that some of us are still on connections that charge per GB in rural areas. Here in Montana it's very common to pay about $0.25 per GB regardless of how much you use, so this is a $1 additional cost per desktop device. Places like public school districts have hundreds of computers and this will be somewhat significant for them.

I was thinking a similar thing. Many of our customers have purpose use computers that rarely see physical infrastructure internet, but need a modern browser (many chose Chrome on their own, we never recommended it).

They're going to get blasted with cellular data charges when they fire up their computer in the field.

Post reply on HN