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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

#831

Post by fastball »

r-w wrote: post #784
fastball wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> vast majority of laypeople have negative sentiment toward it

Citation very much needed. Technologists are not laypeople, and are almost certainly a vocal minority.

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

#832

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #619
oaiey wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is changing the product significantly. I wanted/consented to a browser. Nothing more. Agreeable, nothing new with the browser vendor pushing plugins down our throat which are not browser core features, nevertheless not right.

> I wanted/consented to a browser. Nothing more. I agree. I want just a browser. No non-browser-related features, such as JavaScript, CSS, WebRTC, WebGPU, Wasm, etc. Nope, just browsing. Edit: /s, obviously

A better example of a non-browser feature that crept into browsers would be PDF viewing.

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

#833

Post by fastball »

kingstnap wrote: post #438
ben_w wrote: post #332

> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point. 2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be…

0.04 to 0.1 kWh/GB is insane even for 2018 lol. I have gigabit internet (125 MB/s). This would imply when I'm downloading something I'm using 18 to 45 kW of electricity. Completely bonkers.

It would also imply that it costs Google ~7¢ in only energy cost to deliver that file to you (using average EU energy costs), which is clearly non-sensical given the rates hyperscalers charge for network egress.

Additionally, the cited number also conflates wired internet (low power consumption) with mobile internet (higher), even though this model is only being downloaded to Chrome Desktop AFAICT.

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

#834

Post by fastball »

It is very ironic that this post comes from "The Privacy Guy", given that the whole point of this model is to run inference on your own device rather than sending queries to the cloud, which is also much less power intensive than sending a query to OpenAI.

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

#835

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #785
xp84 wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yep. The fact that it is being hand waved away in this manner as if it was a valid argument is beyond maddening. I am starting to wonder if the move behind land and 'extreme personalization' of software is a fad I thought it was ( I mean, yeah regular users won't, but there is no helping some people if they don't want to be helped ).

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

#836

Post by okinok »

liminis wrote: post #548
sevenzero wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it's still Chromium under the hood. It's the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.

Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it's not getting active development anymore. I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attent…

I heard Arc was abandoned and not getting any more work because they were moving to their new AI browser. So, Zen has replaced it for me, and it is based on Firefox which is nice to avoid the chromium

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

#837

Post by ZetsuBouKyo »

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…

I agree to install it, but I don’t agree to automatic updates. The bigger problem is, I can hardly find where to disable Google’s automatic updates. In the end, I just locked the file permissions to stop that virus-like auto-update program from running.

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

#838

Post by ZetsuBouKyo »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #678
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…

The issue is the size of the 'update' and the impact it'z going to have on your computer performance. If tomorrow Google was to include a Blockchain miner in Google chrome, you'd still say you consented to it by using their software ? Because I'm pretty sure that this LLM is also going to be used by Google to gather data on the user and feeding it to Google, hence just like the Blockchain miner using our computer res…

Hey, you got the point. Is there a chance that Google actually plans to use users' computers as their edge computing devices?

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

#839

Post by ascorbic »

ZetsuBouKyo wrote: post #837
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…

I agree to install it, but I don’t agree to automatic updates. The bigger problem is, I can hardly find where to disable Google’s automatic updates. In the end, I just locked the file permissions to stop that virus-like auto-update program from running.

Auto-updating browsers is one of the best advances in the web dev space in the past decade. I find it hard to believe that anyone who did web development before evergreen browsers became a thing would ever disagree.

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

#840

Post by dmarinus »

gmaszz wrote: post #437

chrome://on-device-internals/ ..will tell you everything you need to know - including model state, file path, device capabilities, etc. And there's a single button to uninstall the model. There is also the ability to load a model from a central location, as suggested by another commenter here, although I haven't tested it yet. The official chrome.dev Prompt API Playground linked in the thread doesn't work. Chatgpt ma…

You can load a model from this page but it's only for testing purposes on this page and it won't be used for the Prompt API.
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