Google this week surprised the Web world by releasing a new browser dubbed Chrome, with speculation quickly hitting a fever pitch as to what the search giant was “really” after with its ploy.

The most obvious goal – a head-on attack on Microsoft’s still almost 80% browser share – may be the most straightforward guess. But more insidious goals – such as secretly piping user data back into the Googleplex to aid in its searches and ad targeting – quickly gained steam in the blogosphere as well.
To address the “Google conspiracy-theorist demographic,” Google’s Matt Cutts, a popular blogger and well-known expert on search engine optimization (SEO) issues, took it up on himself to answer the “tough questions about privacy and how/when Google Chrome communicates with google.com.”

It’s an important issue because, as Google grows, information *about* users is just as important as access to those users themselves for the search and advertising giant. Negotiations over access to customer data are reportedly at the center of ongoing talk of a mobile search deal between Google and Verizon.

According to Cutts, if a user is just surfing around, that information does not go back to Google.com. However, if a user types in a search in the browser address bar – built to simultaneously handle URL requests and search requests from the same box – the browser will talk to the search service to return the best results. This feature is optional, however; users can even set it up to query other search engines, such as those from rivals Yahoo or Microsoft, Cutts noted.

Beyond that, Chrome makes a number of innocuous trips back to the Google mother ship, including checking for application updates, optionally reporting anonymous crash statistics and checking for malware updates, Cutts said.