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.
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.
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.