Chrome version 147 silently downloads Gemini Nano’s weights.bin file to local storage, sparking major privacy, data, and legal concerns.
“weights” is damn right lol
People are shocked when the bad boyfriend (google) that people warned them about, do highly unethical things. That boyfriend only exists to use & abuse you, it has no other purpose anymore.
That “boyfriend” just makes money, he doesn’t know or even care about your existence.
This argument irks me as it merely exists to wash the crimes of companies as if they exist on a different plane of existence where morality doesn’t exist and people pretend corporates are not just a bunch of humans in a trench coat trying to commit the crime without doing the time.
Companies are not people. Companies don’t share the moral with you. Crimes and moral are orthogonal at best.
Companies are created by and comprised of people. It’s very clear that the concept of a company is meant to extract wealth by immoral means while shielding the owners from accountability and consequences that being a normal citizen cannot afford.
Companies are created by and comprised of people.
And people are comprised of neutrons and electrons. And surprisingly behave in a very different way.
that’s not a honest argument is it now?
That boyfriend was once sweet, caring, quirky, and innovative once. He tried many things and was better than his older two brothers, the hip one who charged too much and the lame one that your parents were forced to deal with.
Somewhere along the way, he forgot his roots and became Jennifer Lopez.
Bloatware, in my Google Chrome!?
Removed by mod
Let me guess, you run Linux?
I use Arch btw
My arch system runs an arch VM.
I use arch btw
Removed by mod
I don’t use chrome on my personal computer.
Well I’m glad Google decided to bite the bullet and face the immense, Biblical backlash. So that Mozilla Corporation has a few new thoughts to ponder on.
What if you keep the file around but write to it and zero size it? Does chrome still download the file again?
Eventually it’ll update.
Not on my machine lol.
It’s roughly twice the size of the base app, if it’s the same as Edge, which on my machine is 1.82GB. It’s shady as hell, but “massive” is doing a lot of lifting in this headline.
But…
Isn’t that a good thing?
I mean, running an LLM locally is much more private than running it somewhere in the cloud at a provider that gets your raw data, isn’t it?
All your data stays on your device, while making it much, much harder for Google to argument why it should be uploaded to their data centers.All your data stays on your device
You don’t seriously believe that, do you? They just use your device’s memory and CPU, thus your electricity to shovel through your data and then sending all valuable data to their servers.
For clarity sake, that’s not what’s happening here. (Don’t misunderstand this comment as defending google, I could write a book about how much they suck)
The model downloaded is a LLM called Gemini Nano, and it’s used for things like “help me write”, checking if an incoming message is scam, summaries, etc.
Don’t worry about it itself being a spyware. It’s not; but for argument sake, if we were to assume that it was: they already know a lot about you through their usual apps and services, and get a lot more info out of you through them. This LLM would hardly move that needle.
The actual issue is that they download it for everyone, even if their devices don’t match the minimum requirements. And without consent. And to enable it, you need to go through several menus, as the default behaviour is to use the cloud (this could change eventually, my understanding is that in this update they’re just laying the foundation)
But, it’s Google that we’re talking about. Last year they were sentenced to pay a fine for spying on users despite them having their tracking settings off. And it wasn’t the first time iirc. This kind of behaviour is par for the course with them
It’s already been pointed out in multiple threads that the terms of service specify that even if it uses the on board model it still sends your queries to Google.
Yeah, it’s what I said. Right now it’s defaulting to the cloud
If the reporting is accurate, your data is still sent to Google’s servers for processing. This doesn’t appear to improve privacy, it’s more like an extension of the user surveillance business model that Google has pursued in the past decade.
If someone chooses to do that then yes its a better option, but 4GB of LLM shouldn’t just be shipped in a browser.
I’m reminded of when they pinky swore that they weren’t dissecting your data in incognito tabs.
They lied. And nothing ever really happened to them for it. Proof is that they still have the audacity to do anti consumer shit like this and not even think twice.
Also if I was someone who wanted to run an LLM locally there are many options other than whatever crap google is putting out. You can’t trust them at all with even a morsel of your data.
If I choose to install and use an LLM on my device, sure. That doesn’t mean Google should take it upon themselves to ship one baked into the browser, with no way to opt out or remove it without it being re-downloaded.
Assuming Google will respect privacy is certainly a take.
Say the following single line below out loud:
I am the product.
