chrome_screen_ai.dll ?

[ashutosh khanna]

I am getting warning messages from Norton about this dll and it loaded automatically while I was browsing. I wasn't doing any OCR nor I was initiating the text to speech or anything. What is going on here? I will switch to Edge, this is fishy.

[PhistucK]

I experience Chrome enabling accessibility features even though I am not using accessibility features like magnification and such (a long-standing weirdness/bug), so I am not so surprised this (genuine) DLL is being loaded unintentionally.

I guess it listens to some API that sometimes "lies"/is buggy, or maybe an API that is simply not the definitive API for sniffing accessibility requirements. 

You can check what chrome://accessibility/ says - if some of the things there are enabled, disabling them and restarting Chrome might stop that DLL from being loaded (at least until Chrome decides that you do need accessibility enabled again).

So I would say it is only as fishy as a bug, nothing malicious.

☆PhistucK

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 11:15 PM ashutosh khanna <ashutosh...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am getting warning messages from Norton about this dll and it loaded automatically while I was browsing. I wasn't doing any OCR nor I was initiating the text to speech or anything. What is going on here? I will switch to Edge, this is fishy.

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[Ramin Halavati]

Besides OCR, the dll is used to find the main content of the page for users of reading mode, have you used that?

If you explain more if any accessibility feature is enabled on your device, I may be able to dig into why it is triggered and how it can be blocked.

[ashutosh khanna]

And does Google use this data to rank pages? 

[Ramin Halavati]

No, the dll does not send any data to Google (or any other party). All processing is done locally on the device and all the results are deleted from memory when the user closes the tab that contains the page.

[guest271314]

I immediately delete the screen_ai folder from Chromium configuration folder. On Linux the executable is over 200 MB and does nothing to enhance any browsing experience for me.