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Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent — That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)

submitted 20 hours ago by byzxor@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 7 points 15 hours ago

Per Passerby6497's comment above:

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.