When I turned mine on to look I was automatically following 11 people, 3 of whom were listed as having public profiles (two of those are friends who work at google). I haven't gone through and disabled yet because I don't have time to sit down until later, but I'm pretty sure actually following those steps on the cnet page and creating a profile to then disable is, well, the only way to ensure you won't appear anywhere.

And, yeah, this is a really big screw up. Apparently google *has* responded in some fashion, but I'm not sure exactly how (I'm writing my preliminary exam now, so I'm barely keeping a fraction of an eye on all this bullshit)