Google products are malware, as every user of little snitch has learned. Back in june they pulled the offending code from chromium referenced in this bug: http

Google products are malware, as every user of little snitch has learned. Back in june they pulled the offending code from chromium referenced in this bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786909 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786909 But it may still be in chrome. In short, yes they're probably listening all the time. And once per hour they make a mysterious "software update" call that you can't block (it uses a different address/port each time -- and if you find a way to block that it'll fall back to curl, wget, whatever until it gets through). TL;DR -- google search IS getting that creepy and it is NOT just coincidence?