I know that probably sounds paranoid, but at the end of the day, I would just rather rely on a nonprofit organization or OSS project for anything important, rather than a for-profit company... as long as the quality is comparable.
However, that's a compromise, and it would be much nicer if it were open-source from the start.
There used to be that RLZ usage tracking thingy, but IIRC it got taken out. I'm sure there's other stuff like auto-update and usage statistics-gathering components added to the Chrome build as well.
If I missed anything, please do point it out.
By the way, my goal isn't to warm people up to the proprietary Chrome build. My point is more to make people feel less like they're missing out by ditching it for the freer Chromium.
It definitely has to be acknowledged that from a security perspective, it must be assumed that Chrome contains back doors and "innocently neglected" security vulnerabilities for big brother in all his various incarnations.
So use Chromium, damnit!
In any case, Google Chrome Helper makes me trust Chrome even less. Your comment made me curious about it, and it turns out that once activated, it's perpetually open in the background, often maxing out the processor, and it can't be quit without uninstalling Chrome. Supposedly it's related to Google Cloud Print and/or Flash, but I had both disabled and the above was still true.
Makes the caution about potential backdoors/vulnerabilities seem that much more reasonable.
What?