Flutterby™! : Chrome stealing your storage for "AI"

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Chrome stealing your storage for "AI"

2026-05-06 17:46:05.549752+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

Bruce Lawson @brucelawson@vivaldi.net:

People have asked me if @Vivaldi parks this on your machine. No, we don’t, because this “A.I.” is short for “Annoyingly Invasive”. We know it’s your machine, and you’d rather use storage space for music from The Cruellest Months/ Cheeky Girls, or selfies with your pet triceratops. Of course, you can visit any AI site you want in Vivaldi, but we won’t build it into our browser. There are plenty of data hoovers dressed up as browsers for that.

The Verge: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

Yahoo Tech: Google Chrome Silently Installs a 4 GB AI Model On You Device – Without Your Consent (Via)

Tom's Hardware: Google Chrome 'silently' downloads 4GB AI model to your device without permission, report claims — researcher says practice may violate EU law, waste thousands of kilowatts of energy News (Via)

That Privacy Guy: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. (Via).

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. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re- downloads it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Space & Astronomy Current Events Artificial Intelligence ]

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