Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
What of you just keep an empty file in it’s place? Hopefully it doesn’t do a checksum.
Easy solution- use Firefox or Librewolf instead.
Firefox has a new CEO who is pivoting the project into being an “AI Browser”.