It is astonishing that the word “privacy” appears zero times in this announcement. There have been repeated controversies over exactly how Google sees just the URL I visit. Now they want to see the entire contents of multiple browser tabs?
Yikes! Given the inherent threat of prompt injection, using the weakest available version of Gemini seems like a particularly bad idea.
Not that even the strongest models are 100% effective at spotting prompt injection attacks, but they have way more of a fighting chance than Gemini nano does.
You could contort the threat model such that prompt injection is something to worry about with a local model operating on local data and serving local results, sure.
I think the "local results" assumption is not completely accurate. This line: "You tell Gemini in Chrome what you want to get done, and it acts on web pages on your behalf, while you focus on other things" implies that the local agent will perform in-browser actions, which in theory enables data exfiltration.
Running an LLM locally makes no difference at all to the threat of malicious instructions that make it into the model causing unwanted actions or exfiltrating data.
If anything a local LLM is more likely to have those problems because it's not as capable at detecting malicious tricks as a larger model.
No system is 100% foolproof. If the baseline is “all malicious content gets through” and this method reduces it by 95% but that last 5% is using some sophisticated prompt injection, that’s not a “yikes” that’s a major win.
At a technical level the risk isn’t from the size of the model but the fact that it is open weight and anyone can use it to create an adversarial payload.
What’s really bugging me is they didn’t think it was interesting to even touch on that point in the big announcement. Contrast Apple making a big deal about private cloud compute before it even really does anything.
Yeah it’s insane they’ve totally ignored the privacy issue. Either they’re doing everything on device, which I doubt, or this is the biggest privacy disaster ever waiting to happen.
It is astonishing that the word “privacy” appears zero times in this announcement. There have been repeated controversies over exactly how Google sees just the URL I visit. Now they want to see the entire contents of multiple browser tabs?
And yet my healthcare company's IT department insists everyone only use Chrome on work computers.
I've been bringing up the HIPAA implications of that for years, but people just look at me like I asked the dog to do algebra. All the IT department cares about is that Chrome is free.
