Google Chrome web browser

[Helmore]

While a Google software engineer in search engine optimization has the knowledge and contacts to explain the privacy issues of Chrome, "to the best of {his} knowledge" as he states in link, he may also be a bit biased in his blog. Since it is open source...time will tell.

And what about the unique identifying number that is to be stored with the individual's data which will defeat those that have varying IP addresses? Anyone know the purpose of that, not being argumentative, would actually like to know?

Then here is the official word on it from Google itself:
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html
That unique identifying number is used when you do an update and when you opt in to send them usage statistics and crash reports. Chrome will check for updates by itself, so there is no way of turning this of, those usage and crash reports have to be manually turned on so no worries there. BTW Firefox also has a unique identifying number, which is also used for the same things as what it is used for in Chrome. This is not surprising though, as Chrome basically takes Firefox and replaces it's Javascript and page rendering (Gecko) engine with Google's V8 Javascript engine and the WebKit page rendering engine. I'm pretty sure that IE has the same kind of identifiers as both Chrome and Firefox, although that is probably more tied in with the serial number of the OS and such.

The issue is that changing search engine in Chrome doesn't prevent google from getting search queries.
You use chrome=>google knows what you search for and where you browse. As simple as this, using different search engine with Chrome actually hurts your privacy because you give your data away to 2 companies.

Changing search engine in Chrome actually does prevent Google from getting any search query data from you. The auto-suggest feature that is integrated in the Omnibar actually only works with search engines that support it. I have tried it with different search engines, it does not work with Live Search, but it does work with Wikipedia and Google of course. Also changing what search engine it uses by default is miles easier than it is with IE, in my experience.