By Victor Tangermann
Publication Date: 2026-05-09 13:45:00
As of 2026, Google maintains an iron grip on the web browser market, boasting well over three billion Chrome users worldwide.
That means even small changes or interruptions can have a significant impact. As security researcher Alexander “The Privacy Guy” Hanff noted in a blog post earlier this week, Google’s web browser has been “silently” installing an AI model on users’ devices without asking for consent.
Hanff discovered a four-gigabyte file named “weights.bin,” in a directory called “OptGuideOnDeviceModel.” The file contains weights — the learned numerical parameters of an AI model that teach it how to weigh the importance of various data points — of Google’s Gemini Nano, which is designed to live on users’ devices, not the cloud.
“Chrome did not ask,” Hanff wrote. “Chrome does not…
