How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.
They want to force the prompt API into being a defacto standard without getting buy in by the rest of the web standards body. Having it on by default serves this goal.
I think a local AI model is appreciated, but it being bundled and executed through Chrome, I expect that more or less all data get exfiltrated by Google.
They simply read your mails, how would you expect there to be anything resembling decency in a company like that? It is the ad business.
Doesn't google already extract every single letter you put into the address bar as you type?
The idea that the model is local is just Privacy Washing. What's the chance they aren't capturing your prompts somehow? For "Telemetry" so they can triage bugs of course!
Is it really privacy washing? This author assumed people would think AI was local but I don't know anyone like that. Everyone I know who's not deep in tech only uses big hosted models and isn't aware that anything else exists.
I'm more inclined to think it's cost unloading. Move their cloud GPU costs to your desktop.
Presumably they think the fraction of their userbase who cares about this would be too small to justify the expense of adding a warning message. The mere existence of a warning message implies that there is something to be worried or concerned, about, a position they probably do not endorse or accept.
