Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
1h 24m ago by lemmy.radio/u/sanitation in technology from www.thatprivacyguy.com
Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
Two decades. We're old
I believe they did it a second time more recently.
The big deal about that was that it was added to people's libraries and couldn't be removed.
This isn't pushed in your face, and you can easily uninstall Chrome.
Well, and it was U2.
So we now have a four-way evidence chain - macOS kernel filesystem events, Chrome's own per-profile state, Chrome's runtime feature flags, and Google's component-updater logs - all four agreeing on the same conduct, and the conduct is: a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user's disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.
How do we uninstall or block the download?
Uninstall chrome
So it just to the Chrome app?
The AI Mode pill in the Chrome 147 omnibox is a cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface - every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google's servers for processing by Google's hosted models. The on-device Nano model is not invoked by the AI Mode UI flow at all. They are entirely separate code paths - the most visible AI affordance in the browser does not use the local model the user has been silently given, and the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.
What a double kick to the dick. First, they silently download 4gb to your disk, and they still fucking send your shit to their cloud AI.
Maybe that why Google sent me this bullshit
Chrome includes AI, stop the fucking presses!
Who gives a shit? You use Chrome, Chrome uses AI, so it downloads the model like any other module. Don't like it? Don't use Chrome. There are dozens of other perfectly good browsers.
The article, as usual, makes no comparison to the environmental impact of companies like McDonalds (who use PER DAY what every AI data centre combined in the world uses PER YEAR, not companies like Shell or BP who are orders of magnitude worse than that. This is the usual anti-ai fear-mongering bollocks.
Should Google have installed it unasked? No, that's bullshit, possibly illegal bullshit but honestly considering how disingenuous the environmental impact is I can't trust the legal stuff that I don't know about either. But it is not an environmental catastrophe as whoever wrote this article would like you to believe for some reason.
Honest question: why are the haters pushing their nonsense? What do they have to gain?
look im far from a monger but this argument makes no sense. mdconalds makes food. which is a necessity. In addition its actually pretty well known for its efficiency. So its a question of output vs input. Now granted. super unhealthy but they don't sneak mcdonalds into your home cooked meal while your not looking. This article is far from nonsense.
I'm gonna need some references to back up those energy claims. I do not see McDonalds (or any other restaurant) operating methane gas turbine generators because the energy grid can't keep up with their power demands.
Are they hating, or are they pointing out that companies that claim to be honestly working towards a "greener" end are adding unwanted and unnecessary code to users computers against their will. Code, BTW, that can not be removed permanently and adds not only the cost of the bandwidth of the download used, but also the general cost of the cloud-backed nature of it's functioning to the mix. As someone that doesn't use Chrome or the cloud, I'd be furious.. The Keystone Agent (a perniciously rotten bit of code that eats clock cycles in one's system and runs constantly in the background) that chrome updates with - it's exactly why I quit the browser years ago.
Nuts to that.
A dvd is roughly 768mb.
That means 6-8 Netflix movies are probably 4gb.
This is really not a lot, even with a billion chrome installs.
A dvd is roughly 768mb.
It's 8GB
Only if it's double-layered.
Single-layered are 4.7GB.
Shit… yes, I had cdr numbers memorized.
Also you had movie sizes misremembered - 700mb was 720p divx or 480p mpeg2, Netflix is now more often than not higher resolution that that (1080p for fullHD, minimum, for most people - I have an old TV that's 1080p - though 720p is probably also available), and likely encoded at a higher bit rate, though I don't know what file formats they use. A movie being 2gb is pretty normal for 1080p on torrent sites, and 4gb is not that uncommon for higher res
Thats a lot to me and a reason to keep them on seperate media. Honestly games are worse. Im not sure I would be wild about some rando software I install throwing 6-8 movies onto my machine along with the software.
Technically a DVD is 4gb; a CD is 768mb. But the size of a modern compressed movie is probably 800-1500mb.
That said, that’s a LOT of wasted space on the boot drive, especially given how much hard drives have gone up in price lately