I'm pretty sure Chrome send URLs to Google at least for indexing purposes. I've put up random pages on my websites, not linked to them anywhere at all but visited them in Chrome and then BAM - indexed soon after in search.
Look at the implementation of SafeBrowsing, for instance, which does some clever work with hashes to ensure that Google never knows exactly what URL you visited that triggered the warning. It would have been _much_ simpler to just send the URLs, I assure you.
On one, we have source. On the other, we just have the quote "We go out of our way to avoid doing that, actually." What other evidence?
I mean both Chrome and Chromium. The source is there, we develop in the open, and I'm not sure what additional evidence I can provide to you to prove a negative. Wireshark?
* Public referrer logs created a backlink
* Somebody (else) published the URL
* Somebody (else) shared the URL
* You pinged the URL to search engines or other services.
* The URL appeared in your RSS feed
* The URL appeared in your sitemap
* Your pages URL ranges are easily guessable (/item.php?id=1007, /item.php?id=1008) and traversed by a search engine.
And more recently, something less innocuous: You simply added a Google +1 button to your pages.
When you add the +1 button to a page, Google assumes that
you want that page to be publicly available and visible
in Google Search results. As a result, we may fetch and
show that page even if it is disallowed in robots.txt.
Please see the privacy policy. It answers these questions quite clearly:
...
> When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to your default search engine so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose Google as your search engine, Google Chrome will contact Google when it starts so as to determine the best local address to send search queries. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
...
> If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google so we can help you find the URL you were looking for. You can disable this feature as explained here.
...
> If you enable the optional AutoFill feature, which automatically completes web forms for you, Google Chrome will send Google limited information about the structure of pages that have web forms and information such as the arrangement of the form so that we can improve our AutoFill service for that page.
(end excerpts)
Could you give us more information about the AutoFill feature? Does it send the URL along with the listed information? Does it do this for every URL that contains a web form?