[carbon8]

"they do allow you to view another persons followers"

If that person took the extra step of setting up their buzz profile.

And although your profile might show your followers/following to you, the profile doesn't show the same information to other users. See my comment here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1127647

It is indeed confusing and the way it's designed gives the impression that it exposed gmail contacts, but ThinkWriteMute is absolutely right and it's disturbing that he's being downvoted.

"Couple that with auto following everyones gmail contacts and its easy to find a list of my gmail contacts without me having done anything."

The "following" terminology seems to be the source of most of the confusion, since it makes it sound like something new is being exposed when it isn't. If you haven't set up your buzz profile, the only information your followers can see is you name, picture and chat status updates and anything else that was public, which is what they could see before when they were still just "contacts."