A guest post from the unreasonablemen.net
A couple of reasons. Firstly unlike Firefox and Safari and of course the corporate supported IE, it doesn’t seem to get past the companies proxy server. Second, and most importantly to me I’m not prepared to give Google any more information about myself.
Don’t get my wrong, I’m a happy user of 3 Google services – mail, reader and analytics . But that’s about all i want Google to know about me. Read Write Web has a good history and synopsis of Google’s privacy stance. To me, reading that I get uneasy… real uneasy. Ben Kepes and I have debated this before, I can summarise his position as more trusting than mine. Simple as that.
I know that Google has a stated position of “do no evil”. I also know what happens in companies when they get squeeze for revenue and profit. Not always the right things. Reason number 1.
Another way to think about this. Google is a company of nearly 20 000 people, they’re like a small city in terms of population. And even small cities have bad people. In the US 1 in every 136 people have been caught and convicted of a crime, if you extrapolate that out it means you would expect a company the size of Google to have 147 bad people. 147 people who could mis-use all that data that they now have the potential to access.
End of the day its your choice, but you should be aware of the privacy issues associated with cloud services.
PS I’ve dropped Firefox and moved to Safari as my browser of choice. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
Here are 3 posts for you to read regarding privacy and Google Chrome…
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/common-google-chrome-objections/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-license-agreement/
After just a few days of testing, Chrome is a great browser despite missing some features that other browsers have. And because it’s open source, you can download the code and build your own browser which won’t have any Google branding or be subject to any of Google’s terms and conditions.
Safari is a wonderful compromise; until you’ve been fully prepared for assimilation to the Google way of course
But then FF 3.1 is right around the corner with MAJOR JS improvements too. Unlike before, I think “we the consumer” win this time.
The volume of people in an organisation doesn’t correlate to security issues. It is always about procedures, systems, compliance etc. If it did correlate to the volume of employees then people should be very worried about the 1000′s of bank CSM’s who can access your bank accounts. Banks are large procedural businesses just like Google so I think that is the least of the risks with Chrome.
Incidentally a reason Saasu.com won’t officially support Chrome immediately is that our procedures require that we don’t deliver/support services that are hours or days old into a commercial release. That is very high risk and our customers pay us to protect them from those risks. We need to allow time for security, terms, an operating environment issues to raise to the surface across the web community. Despite the above we checked Chrome worked through our application and it did pass with zero bugs