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.
Thanks to sandboxing in GrapheneOS, I haven’t ran into any of those issues. Things like banking apps that are only available through the play store ecosystem can be installed anonymously via Aurora, and play services can’t usurp the sandbox, so you can limit the permissions of it and all apps (including spoofing permissions that they can’t actually use)
Aurora already existed when I tried de-googling for the first time, so installing apps wasn’t really a problem. Making them run was, because I didn’t want to have any Google trash on my phone. Apparently, nowadays you can trick the apps into thinking that everything is vanilla. Sounds interesting how things have developed. Maybe Graphene OS really is becoming a viable alternative.
Thanks to sandboxing in GrapheneOS, I haven’t ran into any of those issues. Things like banking apps that are only available through the play store ecosystem can be installed anonymously via Aurora, and play services can’t usurp the sandbox, so you can limit the permissions of it and all apps (including spoofing permissions that they can’t actually use)
Aurora already existed when I tried de-googling for the first time, so installing apps wasn’t really a problem. Making them run was, because I didn’t want to have any Google trash on my phone. Apparently, nowadays you can trick the apps into thinking that everything is vanilla. Sounds interesting how things have developed. Maybe Graphene OS really is becoming a viable alternative.