Cross-Posted, via Technology Community.
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.
“Police! We saw your electricity bill! You’re growing weed in there!”
“No no, I use chrome”
“Ok carry on”
a decade or more ago chrome was the nice new browser endorsed by techies replacing evil IE. kinda funny thinking back now
I think about the slogan “don’t be evil” about once a week. I wonder if the founders of google ever think about it still.
Their slogan nowadays is “Be Neutral Evil”
No, there is more money in chaos.
They think it like SpongeBob thinking “Don’t need it”
Google once their stock plummets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJUDogCaTXI
You die the hero or live long enough to become the villain…
Anybody know a good guide for getting off of Google? It’s woven into a lot of my phone
It’s a whole movement.
Don’t try do it all at once. It takes a few years usually. I recommend starting with changing your search engine and browser.
Then setup a new email and forward emails from your old email to it while you slowly migrate it. Then go service by service and look at the alternatives. If you don’t like any its fine to stay on Google just do what you can every thing you remove is money out of Google pocket.
If you want to go full self-hosted there’s this guide:
Decided to disable and uninstall updates on my phone just in case. Hope that doesn’t break things.
This reminds me of back when I first tried Chrome some many years back. I didn’t like it so I uninstalled it and a few days later it was back again without me having done anything other than shutting down & restarting my PC. Had to dig deep into parts you don’t ever need to touch for a normal uninstall to get rid of it for good and vowed to never install Chrome again because this is peak virus behaviour. Stuck with Firefox through it’s absolute lowest performance because of this, too.
Now I do have to deal with Chrome at work and I really hate it. Sadly the CEO loves Chrome so what can you do…
Certain websites are utter garbage if you don’t use chrome. I work from time to time with the American Bureau of Shipping and even with a user agent switcher, firefox outright doesn’t load. I already don’t like ABS but this makes them even more irritating to deal with.
This is all part of Google’s long winded plan of destroying open browsing standards.
For those sites, I just close them and move on and use another. I do that with any site that is total shit or loaded with garbage fly out menus and paywalls and the like. See ya.
If it’s a shop: idc, if they refuse to work with other browsers they clearly don’t want my money.
If it’s some form of authority: I have zero issues with escalating the problem by demanding they give me a paper version of whatever instead. I’m not living in the US, so I’m (still) able to pull this.
if you really need to use the site, chromium-based foss browsers like ungoogled chromium exist so you can avoid google chrome.
If you’re on windows, check the task scheduler. There are, by default, some update tasks that get installed when you first install chrome.
That happened some 20+ years ago. I’m on Linux by now, no way I’ll willingly put Win11 on my PC. But thanks, maybe it’s useful for someone else.
Either ways it’s not anything that ever should have happened.
I was already dumpstering them for the ublock nonsense so this just gives me smug satisfaction.
Hmm, I smell a lawsuit brewing…Techbros never did like to ask for consent, because they often know the answer is: fuck no!
And the penalties are a gentle wrist slap at the worst.
Europe will probably at least deck Google in the face…The USA, well, it will do literally nothing to punish Google unless we can raise a big enough stink about this.
I wonder if disabling the Chrome app on android helps. I’ve had it disabled for a while. I occasionally run into a page or app integration that fails and have to re enable it temporarily but I always go back and disable it. Fuck Google.
try other chromium based browsers like Brave, helium etc
Yeah I already use the ddg browser where applicable but I refuse to ever use Brave.
they got caught trying secretely install android spyware core app , they were testing the waters.
Ungoogled Chromium, for those addicts.
Or Chromite.
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