Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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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.
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trained to click yes to anything. tl;dr legalese nobody reads
All solved with one simple step, DON'T INSTALL THIS GARBAGE!
Unfortunately it is not so simple. Microsoft Windows uses Copilot inside the system. Google Chrome uses Gemini models. Even the duckduckgo uses an optional AI. Nowadays any computer touches the internet touches AI systems directly or indirectly.
- Use as much as possible the local software instead of cloud-based softwares
- F*** the big tech companies. Use Linux, use librewolf or brave or any suitable browser instead of Chrome and Mozilla.
- Use firewall all over your system.
- Use DNS filtering
- Use custom roms In your android
- Fuck Google search. Use another search engine.
- Use Neovim or VSCodium instead of motherfucker VSCode
- Use self hosted cloud services
You cannot avoid 100%, but you can decrease the collateral damage in this way.
Not simple but worth the effort IMO. Totally agree with your list, use FOSS when possible, Adguard Home makes for great DNS filtering, I've been a fan of Kagi for search, gotta pay a little but get a ton of control over your search engine.
If someone is comfortable with computers I highly recommend looking into a VPS, you can get one cheaper then cloud services and use tools like Yunohost to make getting started self hosting not hard.
Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:
- Start
- regedit
- Backup registry by exporting it
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
- right-click Policies, New, Key
- right-click Google, New, Key
- Chrome
- right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
- GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings
- 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.
"Linux is hard" but godawful reg key hacks are fiiiiine, eh.
I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, "it's easy to work around that. You just have to..." and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.
But even if it's easy to do that, it's not easy.
- You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there's a different one for every problem.
- You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
- You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don't want you to be able to remove their trash.
- You have to vet the tools, make sure they're not malware. And continuously make sure it's not replaced by malware in the future. There's no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.
And, most of all, you need to be allowed to do such things in the first place.
I, for one, am certainly not allowed to play in the registry of computers I don't own at my office job.
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Man I sure do wish Linux mobile was a thing. I really want a full on Linux phone.
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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 , 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.
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The increasing enshittification of every service pushed me to GrapheneOS long before Google could force this shit on me
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At least all the carbon emissions will be offset by Windows being carbon aware! Right? Right...?!
"Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions."
Now, excuse me as I generate a picture of a man with 15 fingers on my browser, using my computer with chatgpt built intp it, while next to my phone with Gemini built into my texting app and assistant and maps app and photos app and
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i honestly feel proud that i left chrome years ago, when they removed manifest v2, it pushed me to switch to other browsers based on firefox, currently i use librewolf
How unsurprising anymore in this hellish world where corporates hate your desire for anonymity... but try to hide theirs, such as dark expense accounts, tax evasion, secret offshore banking accounts, connections with crime and hate groups, etc.
My Google chrome took 10GB space on system disc so I needed to unistal it. Now I use only Firefox.
This is very alarming. My eyes have never been opened so widely as they are in the last two months since I started ungoogling and FOSSing. This post has veritably split my eyelids.
Edit: Since reading this thread I have installed Shizuku + Canta and removed Chr9me and about 50 other pieces of bloatware from my phone.
Props to @zerozaku for the suggestion.
It's funny because they're trying to find ways to cut cloud costs by offloading to users, but when that's not a concern, they shove everything into the cloud and then ensure no local running option is available or viable.
They want all of your data in the cloud so they own it.
They want all their crap on your device, so you pay for it.
Bingo
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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.
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Alarming, but not surprising.
The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn't work.
I don't do web development or anything, but I haven't run into anything that hasn't worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn't like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I'll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it's over to normal firefox.
so fucking glad I wiped that piece of shit off my devices.
it's all been downhill since.
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