When it comes to privacy, is Chromium safe to use?

I go back and forth on whether to use Chromium or Firefox Developer Edition. I generally, like to keep up with the latest updates. In my experience, Chromium is fast and stable. I would like to use it, but I give a great deal of importance to my privacy. As a rule, I do not to connect to Google unless its important. I use uMatrix and uBlock addons, and startpage as my search engine. With uMatrix filtering, I only allow ajax.googleapis on websites only when its required.

So, my question is this. Can I use Chromium? I know that it connects to google servers on every startup, and it updates extensions automatically. So, whenever I open the browser, Google knows my IP address and the list of extensions present in my system along with other browser details. I can easily avoid this by using Firefox, or am I being paranoid?