this post was submitted on 05 May 2026

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311

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

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[–] Jack@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:

Backup registry
Start
regedit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
right-click Policies, New, Key
confirm Google, Enter
right-click Google, New, Key
confirm Chrome, Enter
right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
confirm GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings, Enter
right-click newly created key, Modify
set value to 1
OK
Restart computer. https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/

Or, you know don't install software from companies owned and operated by psychopaths, like Google and Microsoft.

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

"zsh: regedit: command not found..." I use arch btw. 😂

[–] greyscale@lemmy.grey.ooo 3 points 28 minutes ago (1 children)

And of course you made sure we know you use zsh because of course you do

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 2 points 24 minutes ago

That's the joke!

[–] Worstdriver@lemmy.world 2 points 11 minutes ago

uninstalled Chrome a looooong time ago on my Win 10 machine

[–] johlits@lemmy.world 10 points 1 hour ago

It’s like the new Bitcoin miner.

[–] baconsunday@lemmy.zip 2 points 33 minutes ago (1 children)

Are grapheneos and apple the best ways to avoid anything to do with google?

[–] turboSnail@piefed.europe.pub 2 points 16 minutes ago

A fully de-goggled Android won't be able to run some apps. For example banking apps tend to be really picky about these things. Either the app runs on a vanilla Android or it won't run at all. Sure, you can get rid of Google, but you'll be making some sacrifices. Another option is to use iOS, but it comes with some messed up sacrifices too.

A third option is to use a Linux phone, but I haven't got any personal experience with that. Looks promising, but apparently many basic necessities aren't available yet.

If you don't really need anything more than email, SMS and phone calls, a de-googled android and Linux phones should be fine. If you want to be more compatible with the rest of the modern world, iOS is the least bad option here. Still, pretty awful but at least you can guarantee that all the modern mobile things work. Sure, you'll be living without Google, but you'll be living with Apple now so... Is that a win? Probably not.

Either way, Linux phones look very promising. Remember to check back in 5 about years to see if the situation has improved. Some EU countries are currently severing their ties with American spyware companies, and this move could result in developing the mobile Linux ecosystem to a more usable state. If that happens, I'm probably going to recommend ditching your iPhone and Switching to a mobile Linux phone.

[–] FE80@lemmy.world 6 points 1 hour ago

A less harmful Chrome derivative:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungoogled_Chromium

[–] Soleos@lemmy.world 2 points 33 minutes ago

Is it sleazy? Absolutely. Is it exploitation of a massive power imbalance? Undoubtedly. Is it illegal? Probably about as illegal as a game pre-loading 4gb of DLC I'm not going to buy as part of an automatic update. The terms of your agreement with Google for Chrome allow them to update their software as they see fit. Their gamble is that you won't switch.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 140 points 4 hours ago (6 children)

Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?

[–] smeg@infosec.pub 95 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Two decades. We're old

[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 5 points 1 hour ago

It was last year. /s

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[–] Melonpoly@lemmy.world 15 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Remember how pissed off everyone was when Sony added software to people's computers?

[–] grue@lemmy.world 33 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Do you mean that time they installed a rootkit on people's PCs when they went to play (what was supposed to be) a music CD, or the time they retroactively and remotely sabotaged Linux on people's Playstations?

Just wondering which massive felony that should've landed the entire C-suite in prison you're referring to, since there was more than one.

[–] Asafum@lemmy.world 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Hey come on now, there's no need to lie. We all know that when the C-suite does it it's not a crime in America. It's illegal to hold them accountable!

/wrist :(

[–] grue@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago

The sad thing is that Sony is multinational, and they weren't prosecuted in Japan or anywhere else, either.

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[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 76 points 3 hours ago

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 , 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.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 9 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

Who still uses Chrome?

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 5 points 56 minutes ago

Got a notice just yesterday that my browser wasn't supported on a site and I needed the latest version of chrome. Luckily chromium fooled it. So... Chrome is still the IE of the modern web.

[–] TachyonTele@piefed.social 6 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Companies.
And you, if you work for a company.

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

The corporate images for our company come with Firefox ESR, and you can file an automated request for Chrome if you want it added 🤷‍♂️

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

That's dope. And rare. Good on them.

[–] turboSnail@piefed.europe.pub 2 points 30 minutes ago* (last edited 30 minutes ago)

Same here. Our IT guys have good taste in browsers, but they also know that some people in the company may still need one of the messy sites that are incompatible with web standards. Chrome is for those edge cases.

[–] graynk@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 48 minutes ago

https://news.aibase.com/news/25955 https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#model_download

It was bound to happen, since they started testing it more than a year ago. While I really hate this decision, I hate the linked blog more. It's populist SEO slop that exists to advertise "that privacy guy"'s consultancy services. Measuring environment impact of the downloads, that's your chosen angle here? Bleh.

[–] magnue@lemmy.world 1 points 55 minutes ago (1 children)

What's it for? My main concern is that when it's used it's gonna eat up even more memory.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 points 39 minutes ago

It would be in the same order of magnitude as the 4 gigabytes of space it uses. I'm assuming it's some local AI assistant or something, but I haven't looked at the code.

[–] tomatolung@lemmy.world 48 points 4 hours ago (19 children)

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.

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