Google skeptics are wondering aloud in their blogs about what Google gets out of a seemingly altruistic introduction of a free and powerful browser technology. Does the company put some secret tracking in there, or does it just want to protect its interests against Microsoft?

See Powell's review: Google Chrome — Is there anything under the hood?

Numerous posts about communications to Google.com from the browser are springing up and, yes, Chrome does do this for a variety of reasons from daily update checks to looking hourly for new phishing and malware site signatures. The search bar that can be used for URLs and queries also exposes some data as does a 404 mistake routing to Google for rectification.

Of course if you are very concerned about such things, the very good news is that as open source you can simply look at Chrome's source directly for troubling concerns. As you do, you will find many intriguing non-obvious knobs to turn like the interesting "about:" URIs such as about:stats, about:cache, etc. You'll also find a number of valuable tools in the source trunk for testing and, if you look hard, you’ll even find potentially-scary comments like:

"RLZ is a library which is used to measure partner distribution deals. Its job is to record certain lifetime events in the registry and to send them encoded as a compact string at most once per day. The sent data does not contain information that can be used to identify a user or to infer browsing habits. The API in this file is a wrapper to rlz.dll which can be removed of the system with no adverse effects on chrome."

The Google conspiracy-minded folks are all panicked about any hint of tracking like the comment above and other items found in the Google privacy page that suggest unique tracking:

Your copy of Google Chrome includes one or more unique application numbers. These numbers and information of the browser (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when you first install and use it and when Google Chrome automatically checks for updates.

As well as some aggressive statements in the end user license agreement. However, this is all out in the open as far as we can tell regardless of intent .The good news is that Chrome is in the sunlight and, as such, do such concerns deserve unsubstantiated attention? With ISP DNS logs being sold for analytics and plenty of less scrupulous and completely passive ways to monitor user traffic, browsers seem in fact only one of a multitude of privacy threats people should worry about.

Thomas A. Powell (tpowell@pint.com) is the recent author of Ajax: The Complete Reference and is a member of the Network World LabAlliance.

More from Powell:

• Google Chrome: Is there anything under the hood?
• 10 tips for deploying Ajax applications
• Firefox 3 review

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