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Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent — That Privacy Guy!
(www.thatprivacyguy.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Technology
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The download is the title and what everyone is latching onto, but few are seeing the other problems, like how it secretly installed that model without user acceptance, how it uses obscurity to hide the model, how it will reinstall if you just delete it (fortunately there's an uninstall process linked in the comments, does that include uninstalling Chrome?). And then how it pretends to be an extra AI thing on the browser but apparently will be used for any searching. Which is more energy use since it isn't local, it's just using the weights in storage.
It's all bad, even if it wasn't AI. It's what malware does.