Oh, yes, we can totally trust the company:
Yes, Chromium is bypassing the entire source code auditing process by downloading a pre-built black box onto people’s computers. But that’s not something we care about, really. We’re concerned with building Google Chrome, the product from Google. As part of that, we provide the source code for others to package if they like. Anybody who uses our code for their own purpose takes responsibility for it. When this happens in a Debian installation, it is not Google Chrome’s behavior, this is Debian Chromium’s behavior. It’s Debian’s responsibility entirely.
Yes, we deliberately hid this listening module from the users, but that’s because we consider this behavior to be part of the basic Google Chrome experience. We don’t want to show all modules that we install ourselves.
If you think this is an excusable and responsible statement, raise your hand now.
Nothing evil about that at all. Nope.
I wonder if they’re pulling this stunt on the Fedora packages as well?
I don’t normally have a camera on my desktop, or a mike plugged in. I keep the camera taped on my laptop. Not sure if I can physically disable the mike, though.
[Update a while later]
I apologize for any confusion. The “quote” above is not a literal one. I just put it in quotes to distinguish from the blogger’s own commentary. It is his paraphrase of what Google says. I’ve changed it to italics.