Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:
- Backup registry
- Start
- regedit
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
- right-click Policies, New, Key
- confirm Google, Enter
- right-click Google, New, Key
- confirm Chrome, Enter
- right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
- confirm GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings, Enter
- right-click newly created key, Modify
- set value to 1
- OK
- Restart computer. https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/
Or, you know don’t install software from companies owned and operated by psychopaths, like Google and Microsoft.
“zsh: regedit: command not found…” I use arch btw. 😂
It’s like the new Bitcoin miner.
What’s it for? My main concern is that when it’s used it’s gonna eat up even more memory.
https://news.aibase.com/news/25955 https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#model_download
It was bound to happen, since they started testing it more than a year ago. While I really hate this decision, I hate the linked blog more. It’s populist SEO slop that exists to advertise “that privacy guy”'s consultancy services. Measuring environment impact of the downloads, that’s your chosen angle here? Bleh.
A less harmful Chrome derivative:
Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
Two decades. We’re old
It was last year. /s
I believe they did it a second time more recently.
Remember how pissed off everyone was when Sony added software to people’s computers?
Do you mean that time they installed a rootkit on people’s PCs when they went to play (what was supposed to be) a music CD, or the time they retroactively and remotely sabotaged Linux on people’s Playstations?
Just wondering which massive felony that should’ve landed the entire C-suite in prison you’re referring to, since there was more than one.
Hey come on now, there’s no need to lie. We all know that when the C-suite does it it’s not a crime in America. It’s illegal to hold them accountable!
/wrist :(
The sad thing is that Sony is multinational, and they weren’t prosecuted in Japan or anywhere else, either.
If it was actually good people may not have cared so much.
The big deal about that was that it was added to people’s libraries and couldn’t be removed.
This isn’t pushed in your face, and you can easily uninstall Chrome.
Idk about that, you can’t uninstall any of the ai bs they put on phones and computers, from microsoft to android. You can’t uninstall edge on a newer computer either, not without being an IT specialist or whatever.
Well, and it was U2.
The AI Mode pill in the Chrome 147 omnibox is a cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface - every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google’s servers for processing by Google’s hosted models. The on-device Nano model is not invoked by the AI Mode UI flow at all. They are entirely separate code paths - the most visible AI affordance in the browser does not use the local model the user has been silently given, and the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.
What a double kick to the dick. First, they silently download 4gb to your disk, and they still fucking send your shit to their cloud AI.
Who still uses Chrome?
Got a notice just yesterday that my browser wasn’t supported on a site and I needed the latest version of chrome. Luckily chromium fooled it. So… Chrome is still the IE of the modern web.
Companies.
And you, if you work for a company.The corporate images for our company come with Firefox ESR, and you can file an automated request for Chrome if you want it added 🤷♂️
That’s dope. And rare. Good on them.
So we now have a four-way evidence chain - macOS kernel filesystem events, Chrome’s own per-profile state, Chrome’s runtime feature flags, and Google’s component-updater logs - all four agreeing on the same conduct, and the conduct is: a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user’s disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.
How do we uninstall or block the download?
Uninstall chrome
Can you even uninstall chrome on an android phone? I only get the option to disable.
Use Shizuku and Canta to uninstall any uninstallable app. Or if you don’t want to bother, just disabling works fine too as long as you are not worried about the storage.
You can use adb on a computer to remove chrome.
Is this happening on android, too?
That depends on the ROM you are using.
The one i am using (https://iode.tech/) is using a firefox based browser that you can actually uninstall.
Probably not stock Android. I’m on GrapheneOS and it doesn’t come with Chrome at all. But I don’t think the article is claiming it happens on Android.
Vanadium is Chrome derived; but I’m sure Graphene de-enshittifies it to the maximum possible extent.
So it just to the Chrome app?
The article actually gives 3 options:
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
- It can probably be reverted at their whim at any time
- You probably don’t have access to it
- It is the most realistic option, just use another non chromium browser
Even Chromium should be fine. I doubt it has the branded Google AI features.
More difficult to remove than install. Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, © navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome AI feature [5]. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.
This is 5: https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/
Obviously only windows focused, so how other platforms stop would require more searching.
I don’t have Windows 11. Still on 10 until October then switching to Linux.
Don’t even bother with 11. At all.
I bought a win11 laptop, didn’t create any accounts just installed the os… Then microsoft locked me out of the laptop with thier new bitlocker bs. It won’t even let me factory reset the effing thing.Switched to linux and im happy. It’s just a steam deck, but it’s still a better pc than the bit brick.
Maybe that why Google sent me this bullshit
How was the van repair?
What? I don’t own a van.
Top row of your screenshot
Oh that yeah that Trent the Traveler. And that was a Patreon exclusive video. And it got it fixed.
What is a Google One plan?
Edit. Oh i see. Is that 15gb the original storage for gmail and stuff? Are we that old that we’re filing that up? Oh man
I remember when Gmail was advertised as unlimited email storage. Then they limited it. Then they sold more storage for it.
I remember when the Google Pixel offered free unlimited high quality photo backup to excuse the fact it had no SD card.
Then it offered free medium quality photo backup to excuse the fact it had no SD card.
Then it offered nothing because it had squeezed serious competitors with SD cards out of the market.
It still does, for models that were sold that way. My Pixel 4 still gets free uploads to Google Photos. Which I should really move to immich one of these days.
No my Gmail isn’t even full, my wife got same email. Fucking scam to make us sign up for their extra storage.
Google One is the combined storage of every service you use, even accidentally. Google Photos Gmail, Drive, it’s all in there.
Emails take up some space, especially if they have embedded images or attachments.
My Gmail had 17 or 19GB last time I checked… Gotta love when they would give you extra storage just for doing a ‘security check’.
I think they lowered the threshold
Not on mine
This is Bonzi-buddy-levels of spyware…
I don’t use Google Chrome, LULZ
Chrome includes AI, stop the fucking presses!
Who gives a shit? You use Chrome, Chrome uses AI, so it downloads the model like any other module. Don’t like it? Don’t use Chrome. There are dozens of other perfectly good browsers.
The AI model we’re talking about here is not used for most of the AI features, which instead relies on cloud services. Those 4GB are there only for a fringe feature most people don’t know/don’t care about, hidden behind hoops you’ll have to jump through to get.
I think the outrage is due to the fact that it is standard on a ton of devices, and not easily uninstalled or removed.
What devices include Chrome as standard? I don’t recall ever seeing a desktop or laptop already have it installed. (The article doesn’t claim this is happening on Android.)
I thought my win 11 came bundled with it, although I could be wrong.
As far as difficulty to uninstall and remove thats an android situation, but I feel like that could be the next OS to get this treatment (speculation).
Dozens of other good browsers?? What world are you living in lmaoo
The article, as usual, makes no comparison to the environmental impact of companies like McDonalds (who use PER DAY what every AI data centre combined in the world uses PER YEAR, not companies like Shell or BP who are orders of magnitude worse than that. This is the usual anti-ai fear-mongering bollocks.
Should Google have installed it unasked? No, that’s bullshit, possibly illegal bullshit but honestly considering how disingenuous the environmental impact is I can’t trust the legal stuff that I don’t know about either. But it is not an environmental catastrophe as whoever wrote this article would like you to believe for some reason.
Honest question: why are the haters pushing their nonsense? What do they have to gain?
I’m gonna need some references to back up those energy claims. I do not see McDonalds (or any other restaurant) operating methane gas turbine generators because the energy grid can’t keep up with their power demands.
look im far from a monger but this argument makes no sense. mdconalds makes food. which is a necessity. In addition its actually pretty well known for its efficiency. So its a question of output vs input. Now granted. super unhealthy but they don’t sneak mcdonalds into your home cooked meal while your not looking. This article is far from nonsense.
Oh, some whataboutism. Great.
Also great to know you don’t have to pay to get storage in your devices, otherwise you’d be quite unhappy to see it taken out of your control for no feature (Chrome still relies on cloud services for most AI features).
Pointing out the huge environmental cost and relative uselessness of shiny word predictors is not pushing nonsense.
Are they hating, or are they pointing out that companies that claim to be honestly working towards a “greener” end are adding unwanted and unnecessary code to users computers against their will. Code, BTW, that can not be removed permanently and adds not only the cost of the bandwidth of the download used, but also the general cost of the cloud-backed nature of it’s functioning to the mix. As someone that doesn’t use Chrome or the cloud, I’d be furious… The Keystone Agent (a perniciously rotten bit of code that eats clock cycles in one’s system and runs constantly in the background) that chrome updates with - it’s exactly why I quit the browser years ago.
Nuts to that.
