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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

#901

Post by AlexanderHanff »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #566
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…

You're missing that this is anti-AI activism

I am a computer scientist and have studied AI for over 30 years, I use AI every single day and I speak all over the world about the responsible and ethical use of AI... not sure how that makes me anti-ai?

I am a privacy activist and I strongly object to corporations reaching in to my device, changing the configuration and installing things I never asked for without telling me or requesting my permission. If that makes me anti-ai, then it is a hat I will wear with pride, thanks.

If you don't like that the law protects my position as opposed to your's, perhaps you could lobby to have the law changed, just as I have done for the last 20 years to make these laws stronger?

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

#902

Post by rapatel0 »

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…

Do you not have compression / deduplication on your nfs backing server ?

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

#903

Post by ahmadtbk »

doginasuit wrote: post #278

"Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software. I don't use chrome for a long list of reasons but it is not standard or expected to get consent for that.

Who paid you to write this

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

#904

Post by ahmadtbk »

account42 wrote: post #878
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.

Then maybe Mozilla should stop doing things that upset the users that actually care to use Firefox in a vain attempt to chase the average Chrome user.

at least we can use ublock and turn off ai

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

#905

Post by taf2 »

phyzome wrote: post #786
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.

4gb? Maybe on a raspberry pie it’s a problem - I’m sure there is a chrome flag to disable

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

#906

Post by emegeve83 »

maxloh wrote: post #423
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 more severe problem is that Google installs model weight files on a per-user basis, meaning Chrome occupies 4 more GB of space for every OS user on your device.

For every profile.

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

#908

Post by neya »

jchw wrote: post #585
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…

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 mean like Siri? It does the exact same thing and no one asked for it, either. That shit barely works too.

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

#909

Post by derfurth »

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…

Yes plus there is lot of confusion; the author is citing ePrivacy and GDPR that are about PIIs, not at all about consenting to an install.
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