Gemini in Chrome

[zmmmmm]

I spent 10 mins trying to find a clear statement of whether Google uses information submitted to Gemini for training and I couldn't find one. It is hard not to come to the conclusion they actively try to obfuscate it because there are many statements that vaguely sound like they should address it but then don't properly do that.

So I would have to suggest, use these features with extreme caution on any page you consider private if you aren't prepared for your private information to get sucked into Google's Gemini training data.

[walkingthisquai]

It's right there in the privacy center. The answer is quite unambiguously yes by the way. (This is for the Gemini app):

"How your data is used Google uses this data, as described in our Privacy Policy, to:

Provide our services Maintain and improve our services Develop new services Personalise our services (learn more) Customise our services Communicate with you Measure performance Protect Google, our users and the public

These uses extend to the generative AI models and other machine-learning technologies powering our services."

[wodenokoto]

We had legal trying to figure out if data submitted to Google Cloud was shared with Google, and the conclusion was that it is unclear from their TOS. Their TOS is a bunch of circular references to different agreements.

[freakynit]

I think it goes without saying that anything Google provides for free, they do it to garner user data. Traditional search is dying. And so is the advertising that comes with it. They are finding alternatives. They'll keep "injecting" themselves into everything we use regularly. Ads will get even more targeted... much more contextual in realtime.

[noduerme]

So, naive question: If you click this button while looking at your bank account or, say, a mortgage application form, or a government website where you're paying taxes, etc... is all your form input literally just sucked into some insecure dataset in the cloud used for training Gemini?

[kmod]

They are definitely capable of writing such statements, which you can see in their enterprise products. In my Google Workspace gemini app it says pretty prominently and clearly:

  Your [ORGNAME] chats aren’t used to improve our models

The Google Workspace privacy hub is similarly easy to read and clear that they don't train on your data: https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919

So they definitely understand that people want to hear that their data isn't being used for training, and they know how to say it clearly and reassuringly. Which makes the omission of that in their consumer products more telling in my view.

[j_timberlake]

I think if Google trained current models on private data, confidential info would leak constantly, it would be an absolute trainwreck. If Gemini leaked your Gmail and Chrome activity, Google would get sued and regulated into oblivion.

But Google needs to leave this option open in the future, in case they have to go all-in on an arms-race against China, if Chinese AI starts becoming an actual threat somehow. And it's easy to predict the USA gov would prioritize that race over privacy concerns.

[tgv]

For what it's worth, these are the current conditions under which it will be active:

* Be 18 or over and in the US.

* Use a Mac or Windows computer.

* Use the latest version of Chrome.

* Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States).

* Sign(ed) in to Chrome.

[FL410]

This is literally the worst part of Gemini. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if, and if so what, they are training on even with my stupid $250/mo subscription. It's totally opaque.

[holoduke]

Or course they are using it. With Google even this keyboard stroke on Android is used for something.

[redml]

being privacy centric is a badge of honor these days, so if they aren't making it clear or not giving an easy to find option, then it's a guaranteed to your queries and outputs are used for training.

[jacooper]

They do, even when you pay for gemini pro/ultra.

[blauditore]

Google generally uses data from free users to train ML models etc., but no data from paying customers. I don't have a link to back it up though.

[kirito1337]

they obvuscate it with legal nonsense

[paxys]

So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.

[qnleigh]

> Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.

Hmm, no? It has access to all of the content of all of you're currently open tabs, and is able to parse images on web pages as well.

It would be neat if it could also browse on your behalf, but that would present all kinds of security risks.

[weatherlite]

> So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.

Well, they're gonna have to support an astronomical scale of queries - not many companies in the world are able to do it and Alphabet is doing it pretty much on their own stack of cloud, a.i chips and software. So sure, the front end is not a big deal but this is still a big move.

[atdt]

It has access to the current page, so you can ask Gemini questions about its content.

[milkshakes]

don't worry -- they have big plans!

https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

[j_timberlake]

They took 1 step at a time instead of trying to take multiple steps at a time, how is that a bad thing. They're obviously getting things prep'd for Chrome agents and Gemini 3.

[nomilk]

I think it will be useful as a modernised ctrl+f

[firefoxd]

The future of web browsing is the tiktok model. Where you don't surf the web, but the web is served to you "algorithmically". Do it long enough, and you'll be serve the pages you want and it will feel like it was your idea all along. Gemini everywhere is the first step.

[thwarted]

An infinite number of people at an infinite number of computers will eventually be served the content they desire.

[OtherShrezzing]

I’d assume one step further, that the human-centric web isn’t what’s served to you, it’s just generative content created on the fly to suit your mood.

Think TikTok, except where the platform is both curator and creator.

[542354234235]

Or you will get the pages that are good enough to hold your attention, while being short form enough to keep giving you small constant dopamine hits. Nothing too interesting or too long, keeping you chasing more hits, to prevent you from feeling like you really "finished" something significant, since that might feel like a stopping place and cause you to go do something else.

[esperent]

I wouldn't gave a major problem with this if the algorithms were tuned to my benefit. In fact, I probably prefer it since most of the web is noise that I don't need to see. So the problem isn't algorithmic content, it's closed source algorithms designed to benefit the company that made them rather than the user.

[xnx]

Maybe, but that sounds a lot like Google Discover, which is part of Android, the Chrome new tab page and (sometimes?) the Google home page.

[lxgr]

That's arguably not browsing the web, that's watching TV.

Nothing wrong with that, in theory and in moderation.

[_el1s7]

No, that doesn't make any sense, because the web is not a social media.

[isodev]

That’s the future if we leave it to the tech bros. As humans we can and should do better though.

[woodrowbarlow]

i legitimately miss stumbleupon.

[verytrivial]

I stopped using Chrome when they started doing the "logged in to Chrome" thing for all Google services. It seemed likely a creepy step in a vaguely defined, unknown direction. The signal seems stronger now.

[xandrius]

Left when they disabled uBlock Origin.

I was 60% Chrome and 40% Firefox, now I'm 99% Firefox and 1% Chromium.

[NaomiLehman]

you don't need to be logged in atm, AFAIK

[mosselman]

This seems ridiculously simple. It doesn’t browse for you in the background or lets you reference tabs etc. This just seems to pass the current page to an llm.

I built an extension like this with Claude-code a few days ago because I wanted to see if I could replace the ai feature of Firefox when I switched to LibreWolf. Turns out, it was quite easy for Claude code.

I want a bit further and tried to get the extension to browse around. Individual actions worked, but I couldn’t get it to follow a plan. In the end I finally looked around the code and Claude had made a huge mess with cursor etc.

The complexity of handling the array of messages was a bit too much for the AI agents.

I now have the same as this Gemini ai though and it CAN click links and it works with ollama too. So more private.

All in a few hours of development.

So I am not impressed by Google here

[Yoric]

If I recall correctly, the main selling point of Firefox AI is that it's offline by default, which means that it doesn't rack up your token bill and doesn't expose your data.

[yunohn]

> So I am not impressed by Google here

I imagine google has to build something that works for basically every kind of user out there, vs what you built. Moreover, it’s self obvious that they would support Gemini but not ollama, again given most users cannot run beefy LLMs on their consumer devices.

[moolcool]

> It doesn’t browse for you

I would hope not

[zamadatix]

Similar threads today, sorted by number of comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292163

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292637

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296416

[geor9e]

A danger with google is how flippantly they will ban google accounts for the dumbest things. Now theres a button to livesteam your browsing tied to your google account. I wonder how many people are going to lose 20 years of gmail Gphotos and GDrive files because they accidentally clicked gemini at the wrong moment on the wrong website.

[onehair]

I saw the new before I sleep, and slepped peacefully. Because I'd already switched to brave 2 years ago. And once more to firefox 2 months ago. With firefox I feel I finally own my browser and no company is gonna push things down my throat I didn't first agree to

[antipaul]

The danger with google is that they suck at user experience

[beebmam]

Does Apple do this often? I've always wondered if iCloud is worth getting, given that it constantly spams me to use it with my iPhone

[ghm2199]

Wait, how does this footgun work?

[smittywerben]

Ah, the ol' Dropbox risk management tactic where they show you a random selection of your photos when you open the page. Or any page on the site. Suggested: "Remembering Summer Vacation 2020". By the way, do you want to compress your whole photo library to achieve Instagram quality while offering to consume more of the photos of your computer, disillusioned by the last few pennies of value that already fell. What's that? Your iCloud or Android device is out of space because the two ProRes videos your iPhone took after the commercial convinced the Apple user to engage the Apple proprietary video encoding button to maximize their Instagram engagement. The Samsung folds itself into a rolly-polly bug shell form. Eventually, all of your photos will be sent to Instagram, the final destination. Once there, after compressing your photos without asking, they will insist on your choosing ZSTD as the coffin.

So, on the consent-quality-useful triangle (WIP), Google is clearly eliminating quality and consent to provide you with a useful interface to the Google consentless compression box. Just what everyone wanted. The future is now.

Notification: You have 2 new views (details button: 2 ad-consenting views, 0 other views) on the photo you took of the compression artifact on a video that you suspect Google might have accidentally compressed without your consent, confusing itself to be Instagram. Unfortunately, your comparison photo gets equally confused and is compressed to be equally as bad as the compressed one. Now the photos look identical, and you look like a conspiracy theorist tweeting about "video encoding" from your Sesame Street Elmo phone, just like everyone else, with no issue at all. "We're in the Ourobouros. Maybe Paramount isn't the issue. Maybe it's Paramount Plus." The Samsung rolly-polly bug interrupts and insists this issue will have to wait because it's 2pm on Friday. Now, your Elmo phone is now the only device still working in the office, as you try to convince your wife why you have to stay late, "Because you're different than the rest of the people posting compression artifact-laden photos."

[aeon_ai]

If the forced deprecation of Ublock wasn't enough to get me off Chrome, this sure as hell is.

[daft_pink]

I was really upset when I found out that my $20 a month Gemini AI Pro subscription only only included privacy features if stopped using the chat history feature.

Gosh I hate google products.

[nicce]

They just introduced endless nagging in AI Studio to enable Drive integration, if you disallowed it. They really want your data!

[be_erik]

I don’t understand who this is for? I just tried Anthropic’s extension and it feels like writing automated selenium tests.

LLMs interacting with markup is not the best abstraction layer.

[skybrian]

It sounds like an alternative for passing a URL to a chat session, with the advantage that you could share web pages that require a log in.

But you might want to be careful about which web pages you share this way?

[resonious]

Right it felt pretty bad. It chugs tons of tokens just to be like "I need to scroll up!". Then 5 seconds later it scrolls up, chugs more tokens. "I need to scroll up more!"

[nextworddev]

It’s for Google to gain complete control of the context whereever you are on the Internet

[mFixman]

My theory is that Google wants to bake Gemini into Chrome to preempt a future antitrust ruling ordering them to spin the browser out, for the same reason Microsoft made IE an integral part of Windows 98.

[bambax]

> Assouvissez votre créativité sans changer de page

> Have a question about what you're reading? Ask Gemini. It uses the context of your open tabs to provide relevant answers and explanations, keeping you focused.

In France some bits of the page are localized, some are still in English -- doesn't project professionalism or inspire confidence.

[wiether]

Ils avaient probablement dépassé leur quota de tokens pour faire traduire la page par Gemini...

[ghssds]

For one second, I thought Chrome now supported the Gemini protocol. Then I came back to reality.

> To use Gemini in Chrome on your computer, you need to: Be 18 or over and in the US. Use a Mac or Windows computer. Use the latest version of Chrome. Learn how to update Chrome. Sign in to Chrome. This feature isn’t available in Incognito mode. Learn how to sign in to Chrome. Have Chrome’s language set to English (United States).

Why can't I set Chrome to whichever language I may want and still have that Gemini thing in english?

[therein]

Yeah, let's have a do-over of this thread. Nice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292260

Maybe someone can post the change log tomorrow and we can do it again.

I'm thinking over the weekend we could post the GitHub merge of these AI features so we can give Google even more exposure.

By Tuesday I hope someone will write a review of these features rehashing the same thing. I'd love to have that be upvoted to the top of HN again.

[albert_e]

Microsoft baked in Copilot into Edge more than a year ago.

It was forced into Windows task bar as well.

This seems to be in the same vein.

[aucisson_masque]

Use macOS or Linux, don’t use chrome. The are getting tinier everyday.

[wunderwuzzi23]

Much longer actually, Bing Chat in Edge came out more than 2+ years ago.

[The28thDuck]

I hereby declare this to be the future! We made it folks. Time to pack it up. See you in a 2002 LAN party.

[alex_suzuki]

Count me in! Do you have one of those fancy things called „hubs“ or „switches“ or are we going BNC with terminators?

[dwd]

I have a D25 Laplink Cable somewhere and maybe even a copy of Netware 4.

[vehemenz]

Yep. Real "metaverse" energy.

[cwmoore]

What is LAN?

[imiric]

> Your web, your control

Typical corporate doublespeak. The web is neither "mine", nor am I ever in control. If anything, the web belongs to corporations like Google. By integrating their text prediction, summarization, and hallucination engine into their web browser, they're further cementing their position of control.

[nomilk]

I tried it on this page and says 'I don't have access' [0].

[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Nx4gJA-qWodYWm-SK87Aa63i_jF...

[zamadatix]

You need to do it via Gemini in Chrome in an updated Chrome install (roughly 140.0.7339.186 or newer) on Mac/Windows using the English language with the relevant permissions enabled in the sections under chrome://settings/ai

My guess is it's either the first part (doing it via Gemini in Chrome) or the last part (permissions enabled).

[Razengan]

Isn't Google putting AI results at the top some sort of conflict of interest?

Like if users can just get the info they want right at Google.com why would they click through to any of the search results? Isn't that stealing clicks from websites?

[eclipxe]

Stealing clicks? What obligation does Google have to send traffic to a site?

[maz1b]

I mean, is anyone really surprised that this was going to happen?

Google is about to break even further away in the LLM race with this move, seeing as they will be getting an absolutely, supremely stunning amount of regular and novel data 24/7. Not everyone uses dedicated LLM interfaces, but more people I know use Google search. As Google === Search for so many.

Nevertheless, it is an business savvy move to make, considering the recent ruling by the judge to not force Google to split apart or break up its business w/r/t to Chrome.

[mind_orbit]

What does this mean for publishers and SEO, if AI starts answering questions directly in Chrome instead of sending traffic?

[deanmoriarty]

What do you think this will mean for OpenAI, Anthropic and their current valuations?

[ocdtrekkie]

I bet the judge already realizes how mistaken he was to let them off. Now they'll use their monopoly product to ensure monopoly control in the new market he was so sure would rein them in.

[muppetman]

How do you turn it off?

[weikju]

Firefox/brave/orion/vivaldi/safari/librewolf/etc

Admittedly some of them have their own AI offerings but not as invasive and can actually be turned off.

[zamadatix]

chrome://settings/ai

[SilverElfin]

Google taking advantage of their anti competitive monopolies

[rvz]

Time for more security researchers to collect more money on data exfiltration reports when attackers instruct and trick LLMs to steal private user information and fall for fake websites generated by AI to accidentally send private information to attackers.

Welcome to the Vibe Browsing security nightmare.

[SpaceL10n]

Does anyone know if they are embedding Gemini in chromium and will it eventually be available in nwjs?

[zamadatix]

Chromium has been building APIs to support fetching on device models so that Chrome can fetch Gemini-nano to run locally. I'm not familiar if nwjs has any plans to do something with that functionality or not though.

[croemer]

> Gemini in Chrome is rolling out to all eligible Mac and Windows users in the US who have their Chrome language set to English. We look forward to bringing this feature to more people and additional languages soon

[deviation]

Knew this was coming thanks to their chrome API's for on-device gen-AI (summarize, translate, generate, etc).

I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner... The amount of data available from Chrome users seems enormous.

[captainepoch]

I hope Brave deletes this from Chromium if it's present in the source code.

[yreg]

Tangential: Do you have any recommendations for webdev LLM tools?

I would like to inspect some part of the DOM and chat about it with an LLM, including the CSS rules that are applied to each subnode in my selection.

[badlogic]

Chrome dev console has Gemini integrated as well. Otherwise pick any coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, ...) give it the Playwright MCP and ask away.

[65]

Who wants to bet that Chrome makes this feature impossible to disable?

[elpakal]

I’ll take that bet. You will be able to disable it but that won’t mean they won’t still run it.

[onion2k]

I'll take that bet too. You will always be able to disable it by not using Chrome.

[m3kw9]

One thing apple should do is to allow you to chat with the Safari Reader summary to ask questions. The giant machine is too big to move fast.

Given this, i still won't use Chrome.

[lionkor]

"This will be so good, just wait! And until then, get used to it!", just like AGI and shitty chatbots that are subtly wrong most of the time.

[gloosx]

Obvious mousetrap. Imagine shovelling all this stuff at users for "free". I'm switching to my own Chrominium builds...

[atonse]

Blah. On the one hand, this is where the monopoly power of putting Gemini in Chrome should be looked into by the DOJ. On the other hand, this might make me switch back to chrome.

These are all things Apple could build into safari, but they're nowhere to be seen. They'll be stuck solving yesterday's problems (like building an infinitesimally better camera for the latest iPhone), but not at all integrating any AI into them.

[vachina]

Google had to do this. They cannot die standing watching ChatGPT et. al. eating their ad-free lunch.

[onion2k]

The problem with that is Google has burned so many bridges with users over the past couple of decades that moving off the ad model to some sort of paid subscription service is going to be next to impossible. People just don't trust Google any more. I know many people who happily pay OpenAI every month but wouldn't pay the same for Google Gemini even if it was better.

Not to mention that actually giving Google money for anything other than an in-app purchase is oddly hard work - try buying a Google business subscription and behold an interface worse than AWS's console. Google has so much catching up to do that it's conceivable that they'll eventually fail.

[iansinnott]

Hopefully this will not affect other browser that are downstream of Chromium.

[ukuina]

This is why other "AI browsers" that parse and simplify the DOM, then invoke a tool-calling LLM over text are at EOL.

Once Chrome integrates Gemini Live amd treats your browser as a video input stream, it's pixels all the way. No lag, no incorrect clicks on hidden elements.

[EZ-E]

We need a [US Only] tag on the thread title, I almost got excited

[hankman86]

I would love to see usage metrics on that. Probably well below 1% of all browsing sessions, quite possibly even less than 0.1%.

Nobody asked to this. Interpreting websites for its users is categorically not what a web browser is for.

[lxgr]

Summarizing a long article (possibly in a language I don't speak), querying it for specific information without having to come up with an exact greppable substring etc. is absolute what web browsers are for.

[SirMaster]

How do we get it out?

[gyosko]

Damn, the future is more and more distopic every day.

[reenorap]

How is this not stealing clicks from other web pages and advertisers? There is no way that people are forgoing clicking on links at this point if they get the answers right away.

[prakhar897]

wondering if we can use it with playwright/puppeteer. would be a godsend for scrapers if they can identify useful data.

[mmastrac]

Given the current err climate of thought purity, doesn't this seem a little too risky of a product to enable?

[Poomba]

I feel like we are past that point now. The fact that AI will get things wrong has been normalized already

[mmaunder]

Ok Google employees, please quit the vote brigading.

[admiralrohan]

Inevitable.

[cynicalsecurity]

Another reason to ditch Chrome. It's becoming an even more horrible bloatware.

[chartered_stack]

Honestly, it would be great if it were "Gemma in Chrome" instead.

A local model capable enough to do the things that this is designed to do? Yes please.

Gemini in Chrome is a way to increase adoption. Gemma in Chrome is an innovation - a platform that allows developers to build stuff leveraging the local model. A step closer to a world where we can talk to our computers and have them do what we mean instead of what we say.

[bertili]

EU: Open goal and no keeper in sight. Just a small tab. Please.

[keyle]

You didn't want it in your computer, bang, it's there!

You didn't want it in your phone, bang, it's there!

You didn't want it in your browser, bang, it's there!

Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s

[citizenfishy]

Gilfoyle will sort that

[blooalien]

> Next, coming to a fridge near you! /s

Well, with Samsung forcing ads on their "smart" fridges [0], Google + AI can't be far behind.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292666

[stephen_cagle]

Damn, not even a month after getting a butterfly kiss of a slap on the wrist for abusing their monopoly position... and they are already pulling this?

Thank god we have strong regulation in the US to protect us. /s

[tzury]

Google's strategic execution with Gemini over the last two quarters has been impressive. Its deep integration into core products—from the consumer-facing Workspace and Search to developer platforms like Google Cloud and Colab—demonstrates a cohesive, ecosystem-wide approach.

This period marks Google's transition from a preparatory phase to an aggressive market push, which is thus far yielding significant momentum.

This contrasts with the apparent friction in the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, where long-term strategic alignment seems uncertain. Furthermore, there's a growing perception that competitors like Anthropic are achieving superior performance in specialized domains like software engineering. This suggests OpenAI's current model, which appears heavily focused on optimizing its existing architecture, may be approaching diminishing returns on genuine innovation.