Posts tagged "chrome"

Google quietly removes the on-device AI privacy assurance from Chrome's Settings UI

Google has quietly removed the privacy assurance from Chrome's on-device AI Settings UI. The sentence promising that the model runs locally without sending data to Google's servers has been deleted, and the toggle moved out of the System block to reduce the chance the change is noticed. There are three plausible reasons for that, and each is a serious problem for users. This piece walks through the legal exposure under the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, Section 5 of the FTC Act, and Articles 13(4) and 5(2) of the Digital Markets Act, and asks Parisa Tabriz directly why the assurance was withdrawn.

Google's "Boss" of Chrome gaslights on unlawful Nano push

Google's Chrome boss Parisa Tabriz tells the press that users can simply opt out of the unsolicited Gemini Nano install. Google's own Chrome manifest proves the opposite. Chrome reached into the device, flipped the flag, downloaded the 4 GB model and only then surfaced the settings UI after the fact. Opt-out is not the legal standard here — opt-in is. This piece walks through why the public PR statements are demonstrably false against Google's own logs, and why a half-truth response to evidence is its own kind of harm.

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

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.