Post · bonfire.cafe

Having been part of a project attempting to measure the carbon footprint of serving web pages I can affirm that using the internet is not a trivial cost for the planet.

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/

#AI #privacy #ePrivacy #Compliance #GDPR #Google #Chrome #Gemini #ESG #Environment #Sustainability #Climate #law

Screenshot of a web page as per link

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
4 May 2026

By Alexander Hanff

Image in shades of orange, ochre and brown of a dessicated landscape with a creek that might have fire rather than water flowing at its bottom — Screenshot of a web page as per link Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. 4 May 2026 By Alexander Hanff Image in shades of orange, ochre and brown of a dessicated landscape with a creek that might have fire rather than water flowing at its bottom

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. — That Privacy Guy!

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.

#esg #eprivacy #Environment #Chrome #Gemini #compliance #Google #Privacy #sustainability #gdpr #AI #law #Climate

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