Privacy and security are often lumped together - usually correctly - but sometimes they are at odds. Security is based on knowing something and privacy is based on not knowing it. This is especially true when two parties are working in a system together (eg. you and me). The more you know about me, the better you can trust me, but the worse my privacy is.

I think the phrase "privacy leaks" is an overstatement, but data is collected based on various services that are enabled. You have the option to sign into Chrome to enable browser sync, but this means Google has information on your bookmarks. Is that a leak? Maybe the convenience justifies the sharing of data.

Auto-complete will start looking up search keywords as you type them into the omnibox. That means it's sending partial searches to Google just by typing in an address. It's sharing information to return a service.

Chrome collects other information on crash reports and usage statistics. See the category "Identifiers in Chrome" in their privacy policy for details on that. It's very human-accessible, as are most of Google's terms of service.

https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/chrome/privacy/

It's user choice how deep you want to go into the privacy swimming pool. You're generally trading off convenience features in the shallow end, and security features in the deep end (eg. Ungoogle Chromium disabling Safe Browsing). Find the depth you're most comfortable at.