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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

#961

Post by guilhas »

bean469 wrote: post #824
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #783

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 priori…

> most alternatives, until recently, were not great Curious to know, what viable alternatives did you discover?

I have used OsmAnd for maybe 10y. And it has been surprisingly good

Several countries. Works offline. Saves the journey taken

Not the best at finding places sometimes. Food places and ratings still has to be google or trip avisor, but those are very relative too. Wherever you go the key e some preparation anyway

For direction I think it is rock solid

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

#962

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

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…

> I mean honestly, how large is an English dictionary? 100 KiB?

If it contains less than 50,000 words, perhaps, but most standard print dictionaries contain ~500,000 entries. The size of /usr/share/dict/words on my system is 954 KiB and the small version of the cracklib dictionary is 481 KiB.

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

#963

Post by guilhas »

It would be better a systemwide download? Of course

Maybe manually point to a local endpoint with one of the multiple 100s of GBs of models that I already downloaded? Even better

Don't even know what the model is for... but as things are, one of the alternatives would probably be send high amounts of user data to google which is worse. I would personally pay to have a 4GB download and keep my data/privacy

So this is an odd take from a "privacy guy"

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

#964

Post by guilhas »

Zekio wrote: post #273
derangedHorse wrote: post #272

Does anyone else find the writing in the article to be overdramatic? Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices. To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 *tabs* open that nearly take up 4gb. The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion. > The roughly 4 GB × N device…

4gb isn't really a negligible amount, given the amount of desktops and laptops sold with just a 256gb ssd

Even so, I would still let them download double that, if they reduced the RAM consumption in half

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

#967

Post by williamkemi »

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 have a 256 gb m1 mac. It's enough, but I uninstall apps and delete files ruthlessly when I don't need them and space is filling up. 4 GB of data which I don't want and didn't had in mind 2021 when I bought my computer is a big deal. Perhaps I should upgrade, maybe I'm behind and slow to do so, maybe 256 GB was a bad idea from the start. Maybe, but it has worked for 5 years and I don't have an urgent need to upgrade for any reason. For me 4 GB of something I would actively go and delete, just for it to be downloaded again and again is perhaps not non-consensual but absolutely disrespectful

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

#968

Post by bixxie09 »

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…

[dead]

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

#969

Post by lobito25 »

vrganj wrote: post #148
pu_pe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some parts of the anti-AI movement are becoming so unhinged that now any use of compute is considered an environmental threat. This degrowth mentality needs to die.

Our planet is literally dying. The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3] Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc…

You're also dying since you were born.

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

#970

Post by Schiendelman »

ChrisRR wrote: post #914
radicalbyte wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eight years ago my internet was using a current over a copper wire. Now it's light through glass. The latter is much more efficient especially over longer distances.

But processing and retranssmission of the data at every network node still takes energy

And plenty of that hardware is more than ten years old.
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