While I have issues with a lot of services Google provides I think Chrome is safe to use here. I don't think they're capturing your communication using Chrome (you could easily find out using Wireshark). They do in many other ways, though.

Chrome is proprietary, use Chromium instead. If they aren't doing bad stuff today, they might implement bad stuff tomorrow and automatically push that update to you. You can't turn of updates in your browser, you have to edit the configuration file for the autoupdater. I prefer any Firefox or any Mozilla based browser, but that is just personal preference.