Alexander Hanff (ThatPrivacyGuy)

Security researcher known for exposing privacy issues in major tech products.

Key Findings

• May 2026: Discovered Chrome silently installing 4GB Gemini Nano model on hundreds of millions of devices without consent. The weights.bin file auto-restores on deletion. Installation takes ~14 minutes and completes without any user interaction.
• April 2026: Exposed Anthropic’s Claude Desktop registering bridge programs in 7 Chromium-based browsers (Brave, Edge, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera) for ~3M users without permission.

Impact

Hanff’s findings sparked debate about the ethics of “local AI pre-deployment” — the practice of platforms installing AI models on user devices without explicit consent, treating user devices as deployment targets rather than user-controlled resources.