Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!
www.thatprivacyguy.com
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.
  • frongt@lemmy.zip
    0·
    1 month ago

    Install Chrome, get Chrome, including the AI parts. If you don’t like it, don’t use Chrome.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    01·
    1 month ago

    You already shouldn’t be using Chrome, and if this is what moves the needle, great.

    At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

    No.

    Just flatly, no.

    Local models spin your GPU like a video game. Unless you think Overwatch is a climate disaster, please learn to separate datacenter condemnation from people running their own computers a little harder.

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I’d say you should read the article a little more closely, but it’s not written very well. But it brings up interesting things that have nothing to do with your local GPU usage. For example, it names an interesting point about simply delivering 4 gigabytes of data to that many people. If pushed out to ~15% of Chrome users without consent:

      • That’d be 500 million people
      • It would be 2 exabytes of data
      • 120 GWh of energy, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 36,000 average UK households
      • 30,000 tonnes CO2 emitted, roughly the annual emissions of 6,500 cars

      And that’s just for the initial data push. Models need ✨updates!✨

        • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Installing a game you want is different than hundreds of millions of people having something they didn’t ask for getting pushed on them.

            • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
              0·
              1 month ago

              What happened to separating personal use from condemning data centers for expending unnecessary and unwanted energy?

                • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
                  0·
                  1 month ago

                  Here, yes. Two exabytes of data transfer could have been one or zero.

                  I don’t get the point you’re trying to make here.

            • shrek_is_love@lemmy.ml
              0·
              1 month ago

              Power use is not always bad. Power waste is. 4GB I’m not going to use is much worse than 6GB I will use.

              • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
                01·
                1 month ago

                The atmosphere doesn’t care whether you found joy in how you’ve impacted it. Either downloading files is bad, actually, or it’s not a big deal.