You know — or at least you should know — that many of Google’s products regularly report back to the Mothership.  Case in point, Google Toolbar:

“Certain optional Toolbar features operate by sending Google the addresses or other information about sites when you visit them.  Web History, PageRank, and Safe Browsing in Enhanced Mode all work this way.  In addition, if you use Safe Browsing, when Google warns you about a suspicious site we may also log that site’s URL and whether you accepted, rejected, or closed the warning message.  We will let you know when you are enabling a feature that automatically sends page addresses to Google, and you can turn these features off at any time.”

What about the new Google Chrome Web browser?  Matt Cutts of Google has addressed this in a post, Preventing paranoia: when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com? Here are the bullet points; you can read the full article for more info.

• If you’re just surfing around the web and clicking on links, that information does not go to google.com.

• If you are typing a search or url in the address bar, Google Chrome will talk to the current search service to try to offer useful query/url suggestions.

• By default, crash reports and other anonymous usage statistics (e.g. which features are used most often) are not sent to Google.

• I believe if Google Chrome sees a very short, stock 404 page (less than 512 bytes), it talks to Google in order to try to suggest other possible pages and options.

• Google Chrome checks for automatic updates every 25 hours.

• Every 30 minutes, Google Chrome downloads a list of 32-bit url hashes of urls thought to be dangerous (malware or phishing).  [Dan's note: Google Chrome doesn't appear to hog my CPUs like Firefox does.  When Chrome downloads the malware lists, for example, it doesn't use more than 50% of my CPUs.]

• When you choose your language in the user interface, Google Chrome downloads a spellcheck dictionary.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
on September 03, 2008 - 11:46 am

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