I'm struggling to understand why anyone would think Google is doing this for user's privacy. I admit I haven't dug into what's going on here in detail, but my first reaction was Google is running a small model on the user's side because it's doing things that _can_ be done on the user side and they don't want to waste their own compute to do it on their server side. I'm pretty sure whatever this thing is doing, Google can easily beam up some small amount of data, have a model churn on it and spit back the result to the user's browser. But why do all that if you can just run some small inference on the user's device?

>You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.

How's this conspiracy supposed to work? A technical audience who cares about privacy aren't going to be placated by 4GB sitting on their disk. They're going to want some sort of analysis (like http interception), or probably not use chrome in the first place. A non-technical audience isn't going to make the association between 4GB of disk usage and the privacy implications.

I am beginning to suspect Google is mass-sniffing on us here. Then it suddenly makes sense that the blob gathers everything.