◄ part 1 (http://www.windows11newsinfo.com/smf/index.php?topic=43028.0)
Why this is unlawful in the EEA and the UK
Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC (the ePrivacy Directive) prohibits the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user, without the user's prior, freely-given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent, except where strictly necessary for the provision of an information-society service explicitly requested by the user. The 4 GB Gemini Nano weights file is information stored in the user's terminal equipment. The user did not consent. The user has not requested any service that strictly requires a 4 GB on-device LLM. Chrome is functional without the file. The Article 5(3) breach is direct.
Article 5(1) GDPR requires processing of personal data to be lawful, fair, and transparent to the data subject. Where the user's hardware is profiled to determine eligibility for the model push, where the install events are logged on Google's servers, and where the on-device features the model powers process user prompts (whether or not those prompts leave the device), the lawfulness, fairness, and transparency of all of that processing depend on the user being told, in plain language, what is happening. They are not.
Article 25 GDPR requires the controller to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure that, by default, only personal data that are necessary for each specific purpose are processed. Pre-staging a 4 GB AI model on a user's disk, against a contingency that the user might in future invoke an AI feature, is the architectural opposite of by-default minimisation and the profiling of the device to determine whether or not to push the model is not different to the profiling used to track you online and as such that profile contains personal data and if the AI model is used, will process personal data, so the GDPR arguments are in scope and valid.
Under the UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, the analysis is the same. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, the absence of a notice-at-collection covering this specific category of pre-staged software puts Google's CCPA notice posture in question.
Then there are the criminal-law violations under various national computer-misuse statutes - which again cannot be overstated.
ESG: the climate cost of the silent push
The Anthropic case I wrote about was a desktop application installing a 350-byte JSON manifest in seven directories. The bandwidth and energy cost of that, summed across all Claude Desktop users, was negligible. The Chrome case is different. Chrome is pushing a 4 GB binary across hundreds of millions of devices. That has a measurable, quantifiable, and frankly alarming environmental footprint.
I am calculating this using the same methodology our WebSentinel audit platform applies to website environmental analysis:
• Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point.
• Grid emissions factor: 0.25 kg CO2e per kWh, the EEA / IEA composite EU-27 electricity-supply factor for 2024 reporting. Globally the figure varies from ~0.10 kg/kWh on mostly-renewable grids to over 0.70 kg/kWh on coal-heavy grids; 0.25 is mid-band for a global push and is the figure WebSentinel uses by default.
Per-device cost of one Nano push
• Bandwidth: 4 GB
• Energy: 4 × 0.06 = 0.24 kWh per device per push
• CO2: 0.24 × 0.25 = 0.06 kg CO2e per device per push
That is per device, per push. A single download of the model. It does not include re-downloads triggered by the user trying and failing to delete the file. It does not include subsequent updates to the model. It does not include the on-device inference energy when the model is actually used. It is just the one-time delivery cost to one device.
Aggregated cost across the deployment
Google does not publish how many devices receive the Nano push. The eligibility criteria gating the push (a hardware "performance class" that Chrome computes from CPU class, GPU class, system RAM and available VRAM - typically ~16 GB unified memory or better on Apple Silicon, ~16 GB RAM and a discrete or integrated GPU with sufficient VRAM on Windows and Linux) carve out the very low end of the consumer install base, but the qualifying population is still enormous. I will use three illustrative deployment bands so the reader can pick whichever they consider closest to reality. None of these bands is implausibly large for a feature that ships in default-on Chrome.
(http://iili.io/BbI24C7.jpg)
To compare those numbers to what an ESG report could compare to:
• 24 GWh (low band) is roughly the annual electricity consumption of about 7,000 average UK households.
• 120 GWh (mid band) is roughly the annual electricity consumption of about 36,000 average UK households, or the annual output of a 14 MW wind turbine running at typical UK capacity factor.
• 240 GWh (high band) is roughly the annual electricity consumption of about 72,000 average UK households, or the annual output of about 28 MW of installed wind capacity.
• 6,000 tonnes CO2e (low band) is roughly the annual emissions of 1,300 average passenger cars in the EU.
• 30,000 tonnes CO2e (mid band) is roughly the annual emissions of 6,500 cars, or one return flight from London to Sydney for about 8,000 passengers in economy.
• 60,000 tonnes CO2e (high band) is roughly the annual emissions of 13,000 cars.
These are the delivery-only numbers. They count the bytes traversing the network exactly once. They do not count:
• The roughly 4 GB × N devices of disk-storage cost, sustained, on user hardware. SSDs have a per-GB embodied carbon cost of approximately 0.16 kg CO2e per GB of NAND manufactured [18]; for 1 billion devices × 4 GB that is around 640,000 tonnes CO2e of embodied SSD allocated to a use case the user did not consent to. This is a one-off manufacturing-carbon impact, but the storage burden is borne in perpetuity by user devices that could otherwise have used the space for user data.
• The on-device inference energy when Nano is invoked. Per inference this is small. At 2 billion daily Chrome users it is no longer small.
• The re-download cycle for users who try to delete the file. Each successful re-trigger of the download is another 4 GB × 0.06 kWh × 0.25 kg = 0.06 kg CO2e per device per re-download.
• The future model updates. Gemini Nano is not a one-shot artefact; it is an evolving model with periodic weight refreshes. Each refresh repeats the calculation.
In ESG-reporting language, the one-time push of the current model is a Scope 3 Category 11 ("use of sold products") emission against Google, attributable to the user-side delivery of a binary the user did not request, in the operation of a free product Google distributes [4].
Why the bandwidth side matters in its own right
In addition to the carbon cost, the network-bandwidth cost is paid by ISPs, by mobile network operators, by users on metered connections, and by every piece of network infrastructure that has to carry an unwanted 4 GB payload to a destination that did not ask for it. Per the Pärssinen reference, around 50% of that delivery energy is in the access network and CDN edge, around 30% is in user-side equipment (router, modem, NIC), and the remainder is in the core. None of that infrastructure exists for free. Every byte Chrome pushes is a byte that competes with bytes the user actually wanted.
For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.
Keep in mind that mobile data plans (4G and 5G) are used by many households who do not have access to fiber, cable or adsl and are used for desktop devices as well as mobile - so the argument that Google won't push this to mobile devices (although I have not found anything official to support that argument anyway) will not fly.
What Google should have done
This is not a hard list. It is the same list I gave Anthropic in the Claude Desktop article, applied to Google.
1. Ask. First time Chrome is about to download the Nano model, pop a dialogue. "Chrome would like to download a 4 GB AI model file to your device to power the following features. Allow, or skip and decide later." Two buttons. Done.
2. Pull, not push. Trigger the download as a downstream consequence of the user invoking an AI feature for the first time. Let the feature itself be the consent event. Do not pre-stage on a contingency.
3. Surface it. In chrome://settings/, list the AI model files Chrome has downloaded, their size, the features they power, and a "Remove and stop downloading" button per model. Make removal persistent, not a transient state Chrome corrects on next launch.
4. Document it. Tell the user, plainly, in the Chrome description on the Microsoft Store, in the Chrome installer, on the Google Chrome download page, that Chrome will download additional model files of substantial size on supported hardware. Currently, this is essentially undocumented to a normal user.
5. Respect deletion. If the user deletes weights.bin, do not re-create it. If the user has a strong preference about what is on their disk, the application is not in a position to override that preference because the application thinks it knows better.
6. Disclose at scale. Publish, in Google's annual ESG report, the aggregate bandwidth and carbon footprint of all AI-feature model pushes to user devices, broken down by region. Treat it as the Scope 3 Category 11 emission it is. Account for it.
7. Notify retrospectively. Users who already received the model without consent should, on next Chrome launch, be told what happened, shown the file, and offered a one-click revoke + uninstall. This is the same retrospective-consent step Anthropic should also have taken.
Closing
Both of these episodes, the Anthropic Claude Desktop manifest install I wrote about two weeks ago and the Google Chrome Gemini Nano push I am writing about today, share the same underlying decision. An engineering team at a large AI vendor decided that the user's machine is a deployment surface to be optimised for the vendor's product roadmap, not a personal device whose owner is the legal authority on what runs there.
The Anthropic case put a pre-authorisation for browser automation on around three million Claude Desktop user devices [19]. The Google case puts 4 GB of AI weights on, by my mid-band estimate, around 500 million Chrome user devices, with proportionally larger ePrivacy, GDPR, and environmental exposure.
Both companies have a public posture of caring about safety, ethics, and responsible AI. Both companies, in the silent installation behaviours documented here, have undermined the foundational consent on which the legitimacy of any of those positions depends. The fact that the bytes are AI bytes does not exempt them from the law that governs every other byte that gets written to a user's device without permission. The fact that the bytes are "small" relative to the user's disk does not exempt the cumulative carbon footprint from being a real, measurable, ongoing harm to the climate.
If Google's next Chrome update silently removes the unconsented installs and replaces the behaviour with an explicit opt-in, we will know the company can read the room. If it does not, we will know what the company's published positions on responsible AI and sustainability are actually worth.
In light of what is increasingly becoming default behaviour, one has to ask a very simple question. When will the Regulators and Public Prosecutors start to enforce the law which has been in place since 2002 - or are global tech corporations exempt from criminal and civil statutes? ■
source (http://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/)