When I logged into Gmail this morning, I noticed a new option under Inbox called Buzz. I had heard all the buzz about Google Buzz and decided to check it out.

When the page refreshed, I noticed that I was already following 32 people. I was curious how this happened. As I checked my “buzz stream”, Mathew Ingram posted a link to a blog post citing the lack of privacy with Google Buzz.

According to this blog post, Google Buzz automatically follows the people you email or chat with the most. For some, this may not be an issue, but for me, it is, primarily because:

• One of the individuals in my Google Buzz follow list is the president of a company who I’ve been chatting with over the past 3-months as we get ready to launch a major announcement. I don’t want my competitors to know about this.
• Another individual is a guy I’m currently dating and I really don’t need the whole world to know right now.
• And there are a couple women in my follow list who I’ve contacted often to talk about possible projects to work on.

As you can see, I don’t need people going through my follow list and coming up with their own speculations as to why someone appears on my follow list, especially since the criteria is whomever I chat or email with the most.

So, I just turned Google Buzz off for now. I don’t have time to decipher whether to unfollow someone (actually there were 2 people who made this decision easy) and I don’t need yet another social networking tool cluttering up my space.

And that’s why some of these new social media tools stink. Instead of opting you out of their service or a feature within their service, they automatically add you and you have to manually opt out.

This was a mistake that a social networking tool called Quechup did back in 2007. When users signed up for its service, Quechup automatically sent out invitations to all the people in that user’s address book in a sly way. Dwight Silverman explains it best:

New members are asked to submit the login and password for their Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts, which are then scanned. Quechup then sends an e-mail invitation to everyone in the address book, making it appear the member approved the action.

Let’s just say that after getting an email invitation from, like, 20 of my colleagues over the course of 1 weekend who signed up for Quechup, I was miffed at being bothered by this service. I never signed up and like Robert Scoble, I kept getting apologetic emails from my colleagues saying that they were duped.

Social media services like Google Buzz and Quechup need to err on the side that opting users out of a feature and letting them choose to opt-in is the best solution.

Have you been using Google Buzz and if so, what are your thoughts?

Update: Thank God for geeks. According to ReadWriteWeb, there is a way to use Google Buzz and not reveal who’s following you and who you’re following. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of Firefox and Chrome extensions to add Google Buzz to your browser. Okay, I’m turning it back on now.