If you want to use Google Chrome but are concerned or have questions about Google's policies for collecting usage data, you might want to give Iron a try.

Iron, developed by German software company SRWare is Chrome stripped of all the user ID information that gave the German government cause for concern.

I don't speak German, but the guys at the Incomplete-News Project have helpfully published an English translation. According to them, Iron is essentially the Chromium source code, with the following modifications:

• No unique user-ID
• No user-specific information is sent to Google
• No alternative error messages
• Crash information is not sent to Google
• No Google updater

I personally don't have a problem with having my search data transmitted to Google (as I'm sure it is in Safari and Firefox with my search bars now), but I do understand the concerns about data-collection potential.

I downloaded Iron, and other than featuring the same squished blue logo that CodeWeavers uses in its version of Chromium on the default tab page, everything worked exactly as expected.