... is now the sound of Google engineers furiously re-engineering Google Buzz to address the flood of privacy concerns since its launch 4 days ago.

The Official GMail blog explains that they've changed from an auto-follow model to an auto-suggest model, so it will suggest people you may want to follow rather than sign you up automatically.

Other changes include not automatically sharing your activity on Picasa or Google Reader, and adding a big, honking off switch to your GMail settings that will actually turn Google Buzz off, not just hide it from view.

All good things, but with many people the damage has likely already been done. Of course many others have never heard of Buzz yet and will find it with the privacy controls it should have had from the beginning.

We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right. We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so.