[exchomedev]

Google does use the "anonymous" usage stats from Chrome to inform AdWords. Source: I personally developed on this feature. Response to rebuttal: the tree you're looking at isn't actually what's complied into the Chrome binary.

[delroth]

I currently work at Google, and from what I know and have seen about how we handle privacy internally I'd be really surprised and appalled if that was the case. Mind sending me more details? My nickname @google.com.

Anonymous reporting in Chrome has been one of the leading use cases for differential privacy at Google. See e.g. https://github.com/google/rappor and https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... which specifically mentions the Chrome use case. This seems to indicate the people who work on this do care at least in some amount about privacy.

(Given the fact that you use a throwaway account I'm very much not expecting to see anything else than FUD, but hey, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.)

[judge2020]

Fairly obvious that Google uses upstream chromium then adds in all of the proprietary g APIs and anonymous usage statistics after the fact.