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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

#841

Post by ascorbic »

Razengan wrote: post #748
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…

Hey if people could go for their pitchforks and torches over Apple giving them a free U2 album that ate up limited device storage space, we have every right to be upset at Google's audacity to suddenly gobble up 4 fucking GB Also from the same webiste, Claude installing spyware: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/ but discussion about that seems to have been suppressed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com…

That was an even more ridiculous post. It wasn't spyware, it was a messaging bridge being installed for exactly the purpose it was intended. It was Claude Desktop installing a bridge that would allow Claude browser plugins to communicate with it. It was only used if the user had installed the browser plugin, and all it did was grant that plugin access to the app that had installed it!

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

#842

Post by Griffinsauce »

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.

Invoking a different case with bad logic doesn't make this one any stronger. I never understand this impulse, is it just "nuh uh!"?

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

#843

Post by zarzavat »

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

Firefox, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium.

Firefox is dependent on Google for funding, but not for source code. Brave is dependent on Google for source code, but not for funding. Safari is dependent on neither but Apple locks down the experience.

Hopefully Ladybird will deliver us from our Google dependence in a year or two. It's already usable for very light web browsing. I wrote this comment on Ladybird.

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

#844

Post by madduci »

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…

Do you know if also Chromium has thesenfkags enabled?

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

#845

Post by [deleted] »

detourdog wrote: post #780
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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#846

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#847

Post by circuit10 »

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 think the disk space and bandwidth are what make consent needed, because it’s implied that the browser may download small pieces of data but the user would not expect such a large file be downloaded so it should check with them

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

#848

Post by scriptsmith »

madduci wrote: post #844
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…

Do you know if also Chromium has thesenfkags enabled?

Depends on where you get it. By default the flags will be enabled, but some packagers may choose to disable them. I haven't seen a major distro release chromium 148 yet.

Weirdly though, chromium won't be able to actually use the model even though it can download it, because the inference engine is a closed-source blob.

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

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

#849

Post by tjansen »

nvr219 wrote: post #571
wahnfrieden wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing that this is anti-AI activism

We should be actively anti-AI being part of a web browser just like that though.

Why? The AI assistance in Chrome dev tools is really useful. And I also use Google AI mode all the time.

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

#850

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

munk-a wrote: post #699
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…

I, personally, have found the adtech bloat (for both disk space and processor usage) to be a huge issue for quite some time. If this is the hill where the public decides to take a stand I'll happily stand beside them to try and reverse this gradual enshittification. I think several other hills were more worthy to defend but nobody noticed those ones so apparently this is the place to fight that fight. I doubt anyone…

Modern games include assets with very large file sizes that operating systems do not.
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