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!
www.thatprivacyguy.com
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.

The article gives 3 options to avoid it:

The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome’s AI features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely

  1. It can probably be reverted at their whim at any time
  2. You probably don’t have access to it
  3. It is the most realistic option, just use another browser
  • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
    201·
    6 days ago

    If you play video games 3 hours per day every day from the moment you are born to the moment you die and every joule of it comes from fossil fuels, you still produce fewer emissions than a single private jet flying one time from New York to London.

    0.5 kW x 3 hours/day x 365.24 days/year x 80 years = 44 MWh in a lifetime of gaming 3 hours per day.

    300 gallons/hour x 7 hours x 47.4 kWh/gallon = 100 MWh from a single flight.

    Also, a person running on a powered treadmill produces more emissions than a person playing video games on a computer:

    0.7 kW treadmill + 0.5 kW person engaging in exercise = 1.2 kW power consumption on a treadmill.

    0.5 kW gaming PC + 0.2 kW person sitting = 0.7 kW power consumption.

      • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
        4·
        4 days ago

        Did you notice in the first sentence where I said “and every joule of it comes from fossil fuels”? Yeah, slap a solar panel on your roof and game at noon or use a battery, and you’re producing fewer emissions than someone who does light exercise.

        There are still the manufacturing and recycling costs, whether the gaming hardware or all the extra agriculture that needs to get done to grow the calories you’re burning by going on a jog. But like how agriculture can be made into permaculture, computer hardware could be built to last much longer if we decide to settle on the current level of processing power. If fossils can keep their detailed structure for hundreds of millions of years, I wonder how long a computer could be made to last.

        All in all, solar-powered vegan gamers produce fewer emissions than most mammals their size. If you say there is no place for gamers in the ecosystem, there is no place for humans or elephants or bison or wildebeest or buffalo or rhinos or pigs or tigers or cattle or moose.