this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
313 points (97.3% liked)

Technology

84354 readers
4385 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
313
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
submitted 4 hours ago by sanitation@lemmy.radio to c/technology@lemmy.world
96 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tomatolung@lemmy.world 16 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

More difficult to remove than install. Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, (c) navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome AI feature [5]. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.

This is 5: https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/

Obviously only windows focused, so how other platforms stop would require more searching.

[–] Fredselfish@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I don't have Windows 11. Still on 10 until October then switching to Linux.

[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 4 points 1 hour ago

Don't even bother with 11. At all.
I bought a win11 laptop, didn't create any accounts just installed the os... Then microsoft locked me out of the laptop with thier new bitlocker bs. It won't even let me factory reset the effing thing.

Switched to linux and im happy. It's just a steam deck, but it's still a better pc than the bit brick.