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They just keep digging themselves into the terrible hole.
I remember when Google’s motto was “don’t be evil”. I guess they’ve moved on from that.
They did in fact a few years ago silently remove it
And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
I guess they realized that money is evil, and not being evil is bad for business.
Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.
What a weird scare-mongery way of saying “Google Chrome installs things it uses”.
It’s fine if you don’t want it using that much space - but don’t act like it’s doing anything nefarious.
To prevent automatic re-downloading, disable the experimental flags that trigger the download.
Open Chrome and type chrome://flags in the address bar.
Search for #optimization-guide-on-device-model and set it to Disabled.
Search for #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano and set it to Disabled.
Relaunch Chrome.
Just uninstall chrome.
If you need a webkit browser, almost all other browsers are based on chromium.
To prevent automatic re-downloading,
disable the experimental flags that trigger the downloaduninstall it and use Firefox instead. Or even fucking Edge. Literally any other browser would be better.Thanks for the constructive comment. I am suspicious that it’s only a temporary stopgap and the feature will keep being pushed on users with increasing difficulty of opting out. For me, this is the time to move on from Chrome like it was time to move on from Windows 11 about a year ago. I am only using it out of some friction of setting up addons on a different browser, but at some point cutting the heads of the AI bloat hydra becomes the bigger hassle.
Remember when the pretty universal convention was that an OS let you pick the components you wanted to install?
This is not the OS fault: since you assumed risk to install Chrome, the OS assumed you trusted the application to operate without interrupting its functionality by asking you permission to download text, images and web content every time you loaded a web page.
Its Chrome abusing this trust to download shit without tell you.
Y’know what? My brain replaced Chrome with Android and I went to the 2GB of AI model that they bundle with the OS now (maybe just pixel devices)
(Also before anyone fancies getting sanctimonious, Apple bundles a 3GB model with all their shit too)
Bye bye google. Your time has passed. I won’t miss you.
Google’s time passed decades ago.
People have been saying this for like a decade and it keeps getting worse.
I mean, that kind of thing is expected with Google products. The depressing thing is that no one who is paying attention will be surprised when Firefox announces they are going to do something similar.
