this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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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 2 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.radio to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, even there. A page loading is one thing, but browser features are somewhat independent of the content. There's also a good chance this is being used as a hook for other Google products like Drive or Docs (which are basically websites under the hood) to allow offline file management, creation, etc.

It's a bad choice, but it wouldn't be the first bad choice Google has made.