Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
Hope they didnt hardcode it!
They did. If you remove it, Chrome detects that the folder is missing and it downloads it again. Just don’t use Chrome.
What of you just keep an empty file in it’s place? Hopefully it doesn’t do a checksum.
Easy solution- use Firefox or Librewolf instead.
Firefox has a new CEO who is pivoting the project into being an “AI Browser”.
Interesting. This update is not on my phone or my PC, which are both up to date. Wonder who it’s installing on.
There is a windows registry tweak to disable it permanently. Just search up the proper key.