Using Chrome? Google will crawl your private data.

When you choose to use the Google Chrome browser, you opt-in to sharing your private information with Google. The browser calls home to Google's servers with information about the URLs that you visit.

Google's bots will crawl the URLs that you visited with the Chrome browser, and suck up the available information, no matter whether you consider that information to be private. My server logs show this happening, that (unique) private URLs visited by Chrome users are later crawled by a Google bot.

I run several web-based products, used by companies and individuals, where you enter private information as part of using the service. I go to great lengths to ensure that users private information is kept safe, and not unintentionally leaked to any third party, or to the public.

My servers immediately reject any attempt from a Google bot to crawl private URLs, containing private user data. But, you cannot assume that all other servers you visit protects your information to a similar degree.

If you visit a unique private URL, you should not feel safer than when visiting any public URL. The only thing that may keep Google from crawling your information is to use sites that require session authentication on private pages.

The session authentication information is almost always stored as a cookie in the browser. One can only hope that Google Chrome does not (or will not, in the future) transfer your session cookies to Google's servers. In which case, there is not much that you, as a Chrome user, can do to protect your private data from being sucked up by Google's servers.

If you care about keeping your private information away from Google's servers, don't use the Google Chrome browser. I recommend using any of Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.