"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."
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 t
Google Chrome automatically installs local neural network components on user systems via default configurations. The browser downloads a 4GB
Procedures for disabling it
THIS GOES FOR ALL CHROMIUM BROWSERS, NOT JUST CHROME. IF YOU HAVE A CHROMIUM-BASED BROWSER, THIS HAS PROBABLY AFFECTED YOU AS WELL.
I use Opera occasionally because a few of my university programmes can't run on Firefox. Opera is a Chromium browser and sure enough, it had this bullshit as well. I had to go into the configuration settings and turn of ALL the AI settings so it would not re-download.
Wikipedia's list of Chromium browsers is as follows (common ones bolded by me)
Browsers based on Chromium
In addition to Google Chrome, many other actively developed browsers are based on the Chromium code. Most of these are proprietary, like Chrome, but some remain free and open-source software (FOSS), like Chromium.[78][79][80][81]
Proprietary
Arc
Amazon Silk
Atlas
Avast
Comet
Comodo Dragon
DuckDuckGo
Ecosia
Epic
Epic Systems Hyperdrive, a chromium end user application for interacting with Epic Systems' electronic health record software[82]
Huawei
JioSphere
Maxthon
Microsoft Edge (not legacy, as that is built on EdgeHTML)
Naver Whale
NetFront
Opera/Opera GX
Puffin
Samsung Browser
Sleipnir
SRWare Iron
UC Browser
Vivaldi
Primarily non-English
360 and QQ, for the Chinese market
Cáťc Cáťc, for the Vietnamese market
Yandex, for the Russian market
Free and open-source
Brave
Dooble
Falkon
Konqueror
Otter
qutebrowser
Supermium
ungoogled-chromium
Go forth and un-AI yourselves friends, and then go check your browser's configuration settings to make sure all of it is disabled. Non-Chromium browsers like Firefox and Firefox-derivatives (Waterfox, Zen, LibreWolf, Pale Moon, etc) are solid bets, and there's also Mullvad Browser (a Tor collaboration) and, if you're on Apple, Safari, which uses Apple's proprietary software.

























