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.
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.