<a href="https://archive.ph/vhTfm" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/vhTfm</a>

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.<p>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 practical discussion to have. Framing it around consent is unnecessarily inflammatory and makes it harder to have a discussion, not easier.

If Chrome has the <i>#optimization-guide-on-device-model</i> and <i>#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano</i> 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()<p><a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api</a><p>When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop.<p>To download, it should check for 22 GiB free disk space on the volume where your Chrome data dir is, and at least double the model size of free space in your tmp dir.

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.<p>As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.

> 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.<p>2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be off by a factor of 10 or so.<p>Not sure you'd get far with the legal arguments unless you're actually a lawyer. Too easy to misunderstand the jargon (i.e. the same reason why it's dangerous to use an LLM as your lawyer).<p>(As an aside, the whole thing reads to me like the style LLMs use; not saying for sure it was, just giving me those vibes).

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.<p>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 priority is AI at this time.<p>Sysadmins should take notice.<p>If the network is ~65% chrome and thus deemed painful, take the gradual approach. Do not push chrome on new devices or users. Watch that problem slowly go away.

Pure, unadulterated, poorly researched and factually incorrect clickbait.<p>Question from last November, even referring to macOS, by @paulirish: <a href="https://superuser.com/q/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chromes-optguideondevicemodel-safely-its-taking-up-4gb" rel="nofollow">https://superuser.com/q/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chromes-opt...</a><p>With policy setting, debug url, docs in the answers.<p>One search away.

"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.

This might be worth it if Gemma4 E2B were a good model, but honestly it's absolutely useless in all our testing without further training and finetuning, and those aren't usecases that are fit for normal web browser use such that one would care to support it by adding such overly broad and expensive infrastructure to make it happen.<p>Gemma 4 E4B is a much better model, but it's too large to simply download and run everywhere.<p>IMHO, this is jumping the gun. Google's going through a lot of effort to release a model that will give everyone a very poor first impression of what on-device models are capable of, souring it for everyone for a long time afterwards. It would be better to wait until a smaller, better model ships before doing this.

This is what I've done after spending some time to look into it, this is for Linux Desktop:<p>Delete Chrome's silent 4 GB AI model file and AI<p>In Chrome, go to: chrome://flags<p><pre><code> Search for and Disable these: Enables optimization guide on device Prompt API for Gemini Nano AI Mode </code></pre> Open DevTools (F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I).<p><pre><code> Click the Settings (gear icon). Go to AI Innovations and uncheck Enable AI assistance. </code></pre> For Linux, in a bash shell, this should prevent Chrome from trying to download the file again because the root user instead of my user, will own the file/directory.<p><pre><code> sudo rm -rf ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo rm -rf ~/.config/googlechrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo touch ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo chmod 400 ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo touch ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo chmod 400 ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel </code></pre> In case they already existed from doing the above previously, make sure root user owns them.<p><pre><code> sudo chown root:root ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo chown root:root ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel </code></pre> List to check them.<p><pre><code> ls -l ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel ls -l ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel</code></pre>

How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.

Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.

Not on my devices. Auto update has been abused so often now that it is an embarrassment to the industry. Auto update should be for bug fixes and security issues only.

The following seems to keep Chrome from re-downloading this beast:<p><pre><code> # From one's $HOME dir: rm -fr ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel mkdir -p ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel touch ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/weights.bin chmod 0400 ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/weights.bin chmod 0500 ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel </code></pre> Adapt as appropriate for your OS. For "Chrome Unstable" installs, the dir name is google-chrome-unstable.<p>This has, so far, kept Chrome from (re)installing that file on my system.<p>Hypothetically the parts involving weights.bin aren't needed so long as the containing directory is not writable.

Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?

Somebody's promotion packet depended on pushing this through the approval process.

I was working on on-device AI for 3 years. This was the prime idea we were exploring, how can someone undercut the OS providers and ship an LLM that other apps can also use on-device. Like if meta decides to do this, it can serve an API to all mobile app companies for an on-device LLM long before the OS is there. This is Google's way of reaching LLM distribution on laptops, since they don't have their own

I don't see how this is going to work when every application decides to ship and run a 4GB model, competing for video memory. It's going to be the Electron problem times 10.

The site is currently unavailable 503 so I can't read it. But I wonder, what should you consent to? Every dependency? Every dependency above 1GB?

> At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push.<p>Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.<p>> For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.<p>THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/consents.<p>However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.

Not too long ago, someone submitted an AI demo to HN that resulted in a 3.1GB download upon visiting the page: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823460">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823460</a><p>It reminds me of the "dialup warnings" common 2 decades ago on huge pages (often containing many images). Yes, bandwidth and storage has gotten cheaper, but the unwanted waste should still be called out. I'm not even anti-AI, having waited several hours recently to get some local models to experiment with, but that's because I wanted to and made the decision to use that bandwidth.

Looks like the site's struggling to keep up with the traffic. A couple mirror links:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp...</a><p><a href="https://archive.ph/sM7O5" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/sM7O5</a> (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)

If you back up to "intention" it's fully insane to make a GDPR argument <i>against</i> on-device AI. Yes it downloads bits, but those bits are not there to identify you - they are basically a local copy of the internet. This <i>enables private data to be kept on-device</i>. Having no personal data leave the device is fantastic for GDPR compliance.<p>The good point in this article is about how the "AI" features in Chrome all use Google's cloud API and not a local model. That's true and some of it should be local. ("AI mode" uses the Web index, so it fundamentally cannot be local, but there are features that could be.)

And that's why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes.<p>Or Firefox of course.

If anything I am glad a bit of shift to local llm's. Their gemma4 is pretty powerful for such small model so I guess that's what they are delivering.

Man the longer all this crap goes on the more I realise Stallman was right

And that will be 4GB per chrome instance I assume? (not profiles, <i>instances</i>) And what happens with each electron app if it uses chrome?<p>languagemodel should be an OS service..

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 <i>also</i> much less power intensive than sending a query to OpenAI.

AI generated header image and a heavy scent of LLM prose, but this guy still complains about the "insane climate costs" of google's 4GB on device LLM?

There's simply no reason to be using Google Chrome in 2026. Purge it from your computer and install a less user hostile browser.<p>Google Chrome just exists to make Google money at your expense, to sell your data and deplete your battery.

One upside to this is that it doesn't use Gemma and instead uses Gemini. So at least for Gemini Nano (apparently called XS internally by Google) it means that the weights are now de facto open and you no longer need a current Android phone to get the latest and best model in this class. This also makes it the only open American frontier-level model right now.

Wow, so glad to see this on HN because yesterday coincidentally I told codex to figure out what was taking up space on my computer and lo and behold their was an ai model in my chrome folder... And i certainly didnt recall downloading that myself.

Hard to believe it's over 10 years since they first started pulling crap like this by downloading a binary to listen for 'OK Google' (including on chromium builds): <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/648392/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/648392/</a>

Alternative to archive.ph<p>Works without Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS, no geoblocking, etc.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260504192142if_/https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260504192142if_/https://www.th...</a>

I am trying to wrap my head around this: if I remove Chrome Browser, will I reclaim the disk space for this model? Thanks in advance.

I think this policy will disable the automatic download of the model:<p><a href="https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings" rel="nofollow">https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#GenAILocalFoundati...</a><p>The prompt API can be tested here: <a href="https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/prompt-api-playground/" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/prompt-api-playground/</a><p>It would be really helpful if there was a way to download the model to a central location, so multiple users on a single system could easily share it.

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

I use brave. Firefox doesn't work in my qemu VM with (none pass through) hardware acceleration, it just crashes the VM.<p>Brave has always just worked for me and seems light on memory usage. Dunno why anyone would use chrome.

Chrome also silently installs a powerful relational database engine without warning or consent.<p>All of your history, trivially searchable. Imagine the waste heat generated by the browser bar conducting thousands of non-consensual searches every time you type.

It's funny how they steal 4gb of local storage but also will sell you cloud storage when you run low on space.

OK, I rarely use Chrome (I like Safari and only ever open Chrome on the increasingly rare occasions when a site doesn’t work in Safari and lately it’s turned out that the site is just broken) but looking at the article and the comments here, I can’t figure out where this 4GB is supposed to be stored. None of the likely cases panned out when I looked.

That's timely. I had been thinking of trying Chrome out again, but it looks like it's in my interests to remain fully de-Googled.

On one level, I can't figure out how bent out of shape to get over this (but read on). Software I use downloads updates all the time, adds new features all the time, and I mostly don't ask for any of it.<p>So if you see this as just a new feature that provides some on-device AI, it's a bit, so what? A new feature? The last GT7 or Flight Sim patch was bigger than this, what's the big deal, etc.<p>However, that's <i>not</i> really what's going on. It theory Chrome gives you a local LLM that can provide local AI powered features. In practice, everything gets sent to the cloud anyway so the local LLM seems mostly to exist as a disguise for that, which is shady AF.<p>As others have pointed out, the solution is <a href="https://www.firefox.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.firefox.com/</a>. And whilst it's been trendy on HN for several years to slag off Firefox and Mozilla, I went back to Firefox as my daily driver several years ago, and Chrome's high-handed enforcement of Manifest V3 extensions (meaning no full fat uBlock Origin) has only served to cement that decision.<p>It's mostly been great. The only downside is that some sites don't work properly on Firefox, and I'm 99.999% sure that's not Firefox's fault.<p>For example, Paypal's post-login verification step breaks so every time I want to buy something using Paypal I have to switch to Chrome. And, no, disabling uBlock Origin and other extensions on Paypal doesn't help - I've done this already. Seriously, Paypal, it's been months: will you please just fix signing in and paying on Firefox, please?<p>And many sites will assume you're a bot first and ask questions later if you hit them with anything other than Chrome or Safari... which is also extremely lame and scummy.

Wait for Ladybug to come out, it'll bury all the company-controlled browsers.

I’m guessing there’s some UX metric out there, that if they pre-load downloading the model, the user is more likely to stick with trying things out; rather than have them wait for a hefty download to complete.

The future is local models. This makes sense and I wouldn't be surprised if future web standards require this to be swappable so that you can use a model of your choice as the intelligence in the various APIs. Being able to use summarization and text extraction locally will be a powerful enabler. Apple's ability to copy text out of photos etc. is really useful.

Chrome has no moat and is always evil. I advocate against it whenever it comes up.

This is total flamebait

They do this so they don't have to host the model on Google servers and then have claims of "Google spies on chrome users and uploads all their data to Google servers, including private dm's".

I'm not a fan of this being downloaded by default. Still, I very much prefer that, if something if Chrome uses a LLM, that's done via a local LLM rather than by via an API call

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The alternative is an AI model hosted on their servers (cause whether we like it or not)

...so what?<p>If Chrome had installed 4GB for some other tooling that most people don't need, would anyone care? My operating system installs with a million default packages that I don't need. Users install applications with optional features all the time. Applications install additional tooling so that they'll function all the time.<p>To the other point: of course Claude Desktop modifies the browser--that's how it works. Most apps install integrations with existing apps. Often apps install a whole collection of plugins, even for things the user doesn't use, so they're available if the user does start using the other apps.<p>The fact that this happens to be AI-related is a moot point. The environment concern is utter nonsense. They're not using everyone's browser to power AI for others as some kind of shared collective resource. 4GB is not a lot of data in the grand scheme of things (beyond general application bloat). I have more than 4GB worth of ads shoved in my face every month.<p>The legal argument is facile as well. When you install any application, its terms of service cover functional updates and additions. You don't have to explicitly consent to all of them.<p>Other than the size of it, I don't have any problem with anything this article is mentioning.<p>This is a huge nothingburger that only caught peoples' attention because of the irrelevant mention of AI.

Has anyone tried out to chmod 400 the download directories? Perhaps that prevents the whole thing to work...<p>I haven't touched a Chrome browser in a very long time and I just hope that other vendors don't take a similar route.

Good time to try Orion! <a href="https://orionbrowser.com" rel="nofollow">https://orionbrowser.com</a>

"sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions" ? Is that what 0.0000001% of the worlds population produces in one day?

Curious how this thread would have been if Firefox did that.

Well,<p><pre><code> npm install … </code></pre> did worse

They want u to buy more and more storage

Nowadays I wonder if it's best practice to run everything in a desktop VM and not on your actual computer...

The question I have is whether there is a means of disabling that download or preventing that functionality.

So we've all got a local LLM on our machine.<p>Can it be the basis for nano-openclaw?<p>Can I use it to run a Karpathy optimization loop?

Botnet browser does botnet things, not surprised.

unfortunately you have probably consented and its between the lines of user agreement

Rolled my eyes when this article got to the unlawful and climate parts. Rolled my eyes harder when I clicked to the homepage and saw what the main sell of this site is. I'd ask why this is so high on HN but it's so tailor-made for this audience I'm more disappointed than surprised.

If only Chrome had deferred implementing delta updates back in 2009 (?), they could have introduced it along with this to make it a net zero change!

While I find the issue at hand extremely annoying and in poor taste (and this is not news - this was known in advance) - the same applies to the blog. This annoying clickbaity SEO slop of a blog seems to exist only to advertise their consultation services.

I wonder what this model will do and if anyone can map out its capabilities?

So that's why Chrome kills my PC's memory?

on desktop you have read/write access to the chrome "app data"<p>on android aicore: mediatek, qualcomm, aosp vendors, and google will pull down models you cant touch

If you use PSD (profile-sync-daemon or similar) to mount browser profiles to RAM to lessen SSD/NVMe wear. This might be an issue for you.

all in storage stocks! imagine how much extra storage the world over is required...

it's so absurd at this point. isn't chrome already so much abused.

The majority of comments seem to think this is not a big deal. Not surprising from this crowd, but disconcerting nonetheless.

What a massive fail on Google's part. They could have given you the option to auth to Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT (or whatever) and provided a meaningfully better product and experience. But instead, they chose to push their crap on everyone. This is the bullshit I expect from Microsoft, not Google.

A 4gb unbidden download is insane! I'm still running machines with 30gb HDs.<p>I blame the kids these days (waggles fist), downloading their Pokiman shows at 4-5gb a pop! No respect for their disk space limited elders.<p>I'm actually gonna have to uninstall Chrome from a few machines tonight.

The whole Prompt API is poorly designed. Devs will end up trying to fine tune very specific prompts out of necessity, only to have them break with the next model update.<p>The logic around not providing access to model version to prevent fingerprinting is laughable when the suggestion to counteract fingerprinting from prompting is the model should only update when user agent string updates. Just put the damn API behind a explicit user permission.

In related news, I’ve uninstalled Google Chrome on all my devices. I strongly recommend you all do the same.

It's a good time to be using Vivaldi.

Like the recent copilot silent signing incident, the without consent part is blatant foul move.<p>If you don't like be treated like anything but human, you should seriously consider replacing chrome with ungoogled chromium or other browsers.

Does Chromium do this?

is this only for desktop or will they bloat phones and tablets too?

These people owe me a RAM upgrade. This is out of control.

I think this is a bad framing.<p>Javascript running on a page can use a feature that requires a model to be downloaded.<p>I have pages that use it, or other LLM models via LiteRT or HuggingFace transformers.js.<p>I try to warn the user, but that is my responsibility as a page author. I <i>like</i> that this is enabling the web platform to remain competitive.<p>The author is pulling a long bow by trying to claim this is some GDPR violation. Have they ever used the web? There are inefficient sites everywhere, with autoplaying video etc.<p>4GB isn't nothing, but if a page wants to use it then hopefully it is useful to the user!

That's why I hate Google. They do the same shit that Microsoft and treat their customer as crap.

Talk about a nothing burger. "OOh they downloaded 4GB!" You mean 30 minutes of Netflix? The carbon emissions thing apparently isn't a big deal since the author says the browser's AI use is cloud based anyway, and offloading AI compute from the DC to the browser isn't really increasing carbon is it? Reads like another AI doomer trying to find something to get angry about.

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It's annoyingly huge, but is this worse than that? It's software - it does stuff and takes up space. If it takes up more space than you think the stuff is worth, then complain it's bloated, sure, but I am not sure why "silently" is being thrown around.

This has to be some kind of a limited rollout, since none of my machines have this AI model installed even when Chrome is updated to the latest version. No indication that anything is being downloaded, since after updating to the latest version of Chrome on this machine, I'm seeing <100 kB/s download speeds for the entire system.

chrome://on-device-internals/<p>..will tell you everything you need to know - including model state, file path, device capabilities, etc.<p><i>And there's a single button to uninstall the model.</i><p>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.<p>The official chrome.dev Prompt API Playground linked in the thread doesn't work.<p>Chatgpt made a me tiny chrome extension to test the prompt and summariser api's when they announced last year - my laptop wasn't capable the time but these newer models are obviously smaller and more efficient, so it has sprung into life.<p>Full prompt and code is on pastebin `7Ja3ATHZ` if anyone wants to test quickly. It summarises the current page and brainstorms app ideas based on the summary.

Masterclass. Hope some qualified lawyers just got wet.

600 comments and yet no one's questioning the math, just running with "4GB" even though the fsevents log literally says that the file is the result of an <i>unpack operation</i>?<p>The file might be 4GB but the <i>transfer</i> sure as heck wasn't, so what are we even talking about? How much data is <i>actually</i> transferred? Can someone just grab that weights.bin file and zip it up with max compression and report a more realistic number that we can do the math with, if the number is even worth doing the math for?

I feel this is great in combination with an agent like OpenClaw or Hermes.

Time to switch.

> Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.<p>OH MY GOODNESS, this is the WORST headline.<p>If Google Chrome comes with an AI model, and you <i>install Chrome of your own free will</i>, you just gave consent.<p>The "climate costs" are happening whether or not the AI is there. Sure, maybe it makes the hardware work a bit harder, but like, come on. I'm still using my computer anyway. YOU are the one costing the climate, not Google. You're the one turning the "On" button on.<p>I don't even know why headlines like these are taken seriously.

Why they insert their "DNA" without my consent?

Another reason to switch to Firefox.

Is it true for Chromium too?

>Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent.<p>Oh my god thats terrible I hope you continue this article in this mode and dont pivot to some unsubstantiated bs claim that makes absolutely no sense...<p>>At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.<p>sigh.<p>Imagine if everyone on the planet start using a memory hogging, cpu chugging browser application what a terrible hazard that would be for the climate.<p>Oh and it might have an AI component in it.<p>This claim is worse than the AI in data centers boiling the earth claims.<p>We can measure carbon released down to the watt. If you have an issue with people using power, shut up and talk to your government about carbon taxation/moving to alternative power sources. trying to shame <i>some</i> power users, quite arbitrarily isn't just senseless its self defeating. Its a measurement problem, the second people start getting shaky measurements of what their neighbors are doing, they start trying to shift the blame.

Google/Alphabet is a big company<p>On the one hand, Waymo seems to have a better safety record than Tesla does. That's not nothing. For someone nominally in charge of SpaceX like Elon is, it's a red flag<p>On the other, Google does things like this with Chrome, and also they arguably censor. It's irritating

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So typical. Just imagining the consequences for someone with chronically low disk space, like me. Luckily I'm a Firefox person, though I use Vivaldi now and then.

Google abuses users.<p>You can also ask why the US government fails to protect the users. Corporate dictatorship at its finest.

I can't read the article (503) but does anyone know why someone calling themselves that<i>privacy</i>guy is installing Google Chrome?

Why the hell can't this just be an extension in the first place? Why does it have to be bolted in by default? Why does Google and by extension its employees have this constant need to assault and violate me with this garbage?

I thought using local rather than cloud AI was pretty universally agreed to be good?

> The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched.<p>God, I'm SICK of this AI slop style. After ingesting terabytes of pirated books you'd expect a little bit more variety in it's writing.

local: FUCK YOU GOOGLE<p>cloud: FUCK YOU GOOGLE<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AeO-dKGBLs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AeO-dKGBLs</a>

That's crazy just another reason I've been degoogling my phone.

This is egregious and the only people who can get away with it are these Big Tech companies. The legal analysis is moot. They have operated with impunity for decades. The law, especially with AI, only applies to organizations that Big Tech and the government want to eliminate. Rules for thee, not for me.

If only there was an orange canine coming to help us

I can't for the life of me understand how this browser has become the world's most used. It's literally from an ad company.

Sorry but the whole climate angle on this is extremely stupid and needs to be challenged. I have noticed this new phenomenon of people using climate as a trump card to oppose any thing they don’t like.<p>The thing about these kind of arguments is that any economic activity or any sort of action involves some load on climate. The magnitudes are important.<p>In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emissions as 50 such downloads. What’s really the point of this kind of virtue signalling?

it also installs an entire remote desktop stack on your computer without consent, and video codecs, and pdf reader... what is new here?

This is a bit disingenuous. If you install Chrome, you install Chrome and all it's parts. They don't ask your consent for individual parts because that would be absurd. If you don't want Chrome and all its parts, don't use it.

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> Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.<p>This is satire, obviously.

Besides the numbers being stupidly overblown, this post shows why Europe is in a unstoppable death spiral.

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.<p>> The roughly 4 GB × N devices of disk-storage cost, sustained, on user hardware. SSDs have a per-GB embodied carbon cost of approximately 0.16 kg CO2e per GB of NAND manufactured [18]<p>The estimated environmental aspect of the download also seems like an overblown point, noted for sensationalism. There are always hand-wavy numbers involved and I had to look no further than the quote above to find evidence of this. The reference for [18], "The dirty secret of SSDs: embodied carbon", incorrectly links to "Toward Carbon-Aware Networking" and makes no mention of the environmental cost of SSDs. After looking up "The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon" myself, I was able to see the same methodologies as I was expecting used [1].<p>> We conducted an analysis encompassing 94 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reports, which collectively quantify the embodied cost of SSDs. Owing to the scarcity of direct and up-to-date LCA studies focused specifically on SSDs. We compiled a dataset comprising LCA reports pertaining to Server, Workstation, Desktop, Laptop, and Chromebook products, all of which feature SSDs<p>All these studies rely on metrics extrapolated from layered assumptions and end up being used by those who try to use them as objective numbers.<p>[1] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10793" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10793</a>

I don't get the outrage. AAA games routinely take 100-200 GBs. I certainly prefer local inference to feeding google my private data over the network (assuming they actually don't do that anyway...)

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Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.