Quote from the article: "In fact, Google stressed that the only information that flows back at all from Chrome is what people are searching for from within the browser, if they are using Google as their search engine."

I'm pretty positive that's not true. If you run Fiddler when browsing with Chrome you will see constant hits to toolbarqueries.clients.google.com whether you're using Google or not. I could be browsing some MS site and toolbarqueries.clients.google.com gets hit. Chromium doesn't do this.

Edit: You can uncheck everything under privacy and it will still send those requests.

Edit2: What it sends back looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><autofillquery clientversion="6.1.1715.1442/en (GGLL)"><form signature="8551191143090325242"><field signature="620769395"/><field signature="2995202485"/><field signature="2175865763"/><field signature="904516291"/><field signature="2953051246"/><field signature="2649047790"/><field signature="2308153337"/><field signature="1003471793"/><field signature="3255484099"/><field signature="1305698505"/><field signature="3676143819"/><field signature="1275502930"/></form></autofillquery>

Looks like auto-fill data, but this happens when I click around a site, NOT when searching Google or typing something in the address bar. For some sites (interestingly, not all) it sends 3 requests for each page load.