Posts tagged "climate"

Amazon Ring's Familiar Faces is a textbook example for ECD

Amazon's Ring Familiar Faces biometrically scans every person who approaches a Ring doorbell, performs the match in Amazon's cloud rather than on the device that could have done it locally, and stores faceprints of non-consenting strangers for up to thirty days. The architectural choice produces two independent breaches: a GDPR exposure the household-activity defence cannot reach, and an avoidable datacentre carbon cost that brings the feature within the conceptual territory of the Environmental Crimes Directive. This piece walks through Articles 5, 6, 9, 13 and 25 GDPR, the Lindqvist, Rynes, Fashion ID and Jehovan todistajat line of CJEU authority, and Directive (EU) 2024/1203, and asks the regulators directly when biometric mass-processing of non-consenting people will be treated as the breach it plainly is.

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.