Today Google bricked my Chromebook by force-installing a hidden extension

This seems like a bug in the ScreenAI service? There's no evidence whatsoever for his claim that Google "trains a machine vision model on the contents of my screen".

According to https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/servic... it is just inference.

> These functionalities are entirely on device and do not send any data to network or store on disk.

There is also this description in the Chrome OS source code:

> ScreenAI is a binary to provide AI based models to improve assistive technologies. The binary is written in C++ and is currently used by ReadAnything and PdfOcr services on Chrome OS.

This. Go to chrome://flags and disable “Enable OCR For Local Image Search” and I bet the problem goes away.

It’s a stupid feature for Google to enable by default on systems that are generally very low spec and badly made, but it’s not some evil data slurp. One of the most obnoxious things about enshittification is the corrosive effect it seems to have had on technical users’ curiosity: instead of researching and fixing problems, people now seem very prone to jump to “the software is evil and bad” and give up at doing any kind of actual investigation.